Mind the Gap: Crossing the Clarinet Break Demystified
by Alexandra Doyle
Date Posted: April 30, 2025
When I visit schools for Vandoren clarinet clinics and ask the directors what tips and tricks they want me to teach their clarinet students, the answer is almost always the same: “Please help them learn how to cross the break smoothly!”
We’ve all seen the memes about crossing the break (one small step for man, one giant leap for clarinetkind, etc.). Yes, crossing the register change on the clarinet can be challenging, but if we break it down into its parts, we can discover why students struggle with this fundamental skill and give them the tools they need to succeed.
In my opinion, these are the core skills that go into crossing the break smoothly:
Core Skills for Crossing the Break Smoothly
Good clarinet position & support
Air (duh!)
Covering all the holes simultaneously and with enough pressure
Training the left hand thumb and first finger to deal with the A and Bb keys correctly
Courage and confidence
Why Crossing the Break is Difficult
The last of these is probably the easiest for music educators to fix, believe it or not. When I see a large group of students who all struggle with crossing the break, I can almost guarantee that their band director has repeatedly told them that crossing the break is difficult. If you try to teach anyone a new skill, from riding a bike to playing an instrument, and you preface it by bemoaning how hard and scary it is, that’s the mindset that the learner will take to the situation!
Turn it into a Positive
Instead of framing the register change as difficult, get them excited about it by saying things like, “Ok, class, today we are going to learn how to change registers! It might be a little scary at first, but this is your clarinet super power– no other instrument has a register key, and it’s time we learn how to use the thing that makes you so special.” Don’t tell them it’s easy, because for some students, it isn’t, but by making it into an exciting time in their musical growth, they will be willing to put in the work to practice and get good at it. They will see it as a jewel in their crowns rather than a dragon to be fought every time they play a C major scale.
Now, let’s dive into the specific mechanical skills that help students cross the break.
"...by making it into an exciting time in their musical growth, they will be willing to put in the work to practice and get good at it." - Dr. Alexandra Doyle
Clarinet Position & Support
The clarinet’s core support should be a straight line upward from the right thumb under the thumb rest and into the top teeth– this is why we use thumb rest cushions and mouthpiece patches! I’m all for letting students rest their bell on their legs when necessary, but they need to be doing so in such a way that the clarinet is still anchored upward. I remind my students of this by (constantly) saying, “Clarinet up, air down!” You can imagine two opposite arrows along the length of the clarinet representing the force supporting the instrument and the force of the air through the bell.
Some students have issues crossing the break because they lose this support when their fingers come down. Sometimes, they will even visibly slouch down or bob their head down when they go from A to B. Correcting clarinet support is an issue that should be addressed in more situations than just this one, but this is a great time to see it. If students are doing this, I will remind them that their finger muscles are strong and should be used to help hold the clarinet up, not weigh it down. It should be easier to hold the instrument up with all those fingers down!
Not only can this change in posture affect the sound quality, but in this case, letting the clarinet fall down puts undue pressure against the reed. Students might also be spitting out the mouthpiece a bit if they’re doing this, which makes it even more difficult for the reed to vibrate. If these things are happening, students might feel like it’s hard to get a sound on these notes, because they’re actually preventing the sound from starting at the mouthpiece. If a student can keep their clarinet supported upward while crossing the break, we can remove pinching the reed from our list of potential problems.
Air (duh!)
This might sound obvious, because of course the clarinet is a woodWIND instrument, as I so often remind my students. What we rarely consider (and rarely explain to students), however, is the difference in the practical length of the instrument when we’re crossing the break.
Consider the change from a throat Bb to a long B natural on the clarinet. With a Bb, we are making the clarinet nearly as short as it can possibly be. The air is coming out of several holes at the very top of the instrument– the A key and the register tube. Yes, the rest of the instrument matters in this situation, but we are basically only using a clarinet that’s maybe 5 inches long.
When we switch to a long B natural, we are going from nearly the shortest possible airstream to the absolute longest, where we are covering every single hole on the instrument, and all of our air is forced all the way through to the bell. In a split second, our airstream is tripling in length!
With this in mind, we can immediately understand why crossing the break requires the smallest extra push of air right at the moment of change. Other players may disagree with me on this, but in my experience, I stomp on the metaphorical accelerator just a tiny bit when shifting from a throat tone to the bottom of the second register. You can explain this to students by telling them to spin their air more when they change registers, or you can use the visual of throwing a dart, or maybe even a blowgun dart. Just be careful that students don’t push this extra air in an unfocused manner!
Covering the Holes
This also might seem pretty obvious, but how many band directors have checked to see if their clarinet students can play an open G to a low C smoothly before they try crossing the break? Or a low C down to a low E? Moving all your fingers together is a crucial fundamental skill to crossing the break, and it’s one we almost never train our students to do before we get to this phase.
When I start beginner clarinets, I push towards this goal immediately. If you know the Essential Elements beginner book, you know that those “Grenadilla Gorilla” exercises show up very quickly! With this in mind, I start my beginners with what I call “Finger Wiggles” as soon as possible– basically as soon as they can make a sound.
Finger Wiggles Applied
The concept is very simple and one that I adapted from my own time as a beginning band student. Step one is to train students to wiggle each finger by itself and use enough pressure to change notes immediately, without any glissando. Step two is to wiggle multiple fingers– again, without any glissando. I usually tell students to “squeeze, release” when doing these. Most students start out not using enough pressure on the instrument, so there’s relatively little risk of them having too much tension right off the bat. I have also found that if you explain to students that this is about training their fingers to go exactly to the right spot with exactly the right pressure immediately, they are happy to practice these slowly and carefully. Speed should always be a secondary concern, since it will naturally follow from good technique.
With this in mind, the “Left Hand Finger Wiggles” start from open G to F, then F to E, and so forth down to D to C. Then, they repeat with G to F, G to E, down to G to C. The “Right Hand Finger Wiggles” are similar but only working the right hand, so C to Bb, Bb to A, etc down to Bb to F, then C to Bb, C to A, all the way to C to F. Make sure the students are slurring these so that you can really hear if their fingers are moving smoothly!
Left Thumb and First Finger
The last component of crossing the break is making sure that the left thumb and first finger are rolling correctly. Students seem to think that their fingers can teleport from one place to another, which is simply not the case!
The most widely-successful position for the left thumb is to keep it perpetually at about a 45-degree angle up and to the player’s right (or about 2 o’clock from the player’s perspective). Students can have all kinds of register issues if their thumb is kept either completely vertical or completely horizontal. This is the easiest to remedy from day one, so try to check on beginners’ thumb position as soon as they learn how to play an F. They should be able to hit the register key by flexing the thumb’s top joint; if they are having to reposition by scooting the thumb, something has gone awry.
Try the "Ambulance Drills" First with Your Students
Similarly, the left hand first finger should be hitting the A key on the side of the knuckle. This key is shaped this way so that players can roll directly from the tone hole to the key without any interruptions; otherwise, it would have a roller on it! To help with this, I like to give my students what I call ambulance drills. This is very simple– just have them slur between an F# and an A, back and forth. If they can do it with zero hiccups in the sound and no accidental open G in the middle (both directions!), they should be good to go for reaching the second register smoothly from either an A or a Bb.
Next, Try This "Crossing the Break" Exercise
Once students can do all of these skills independently, I like to put them together into this handy “Crossing the Break” exercise, which is pretty much the culmination of everything we’ve discussed here. I like to have them play the C with the right pinky and the B with the left, just so that they are getting practice on both hands.
Exercise for Second Register Voicing
And, although the second register itself is not quite within the scope of this paper, I also like to give my younger students this “Second Register” exercise to help with voicing, second register articulation, and using the register key smoothly.
Remember that tongue position really matters at the top of the second register, and that articulation needs to be a bit lighter to achieve the same sound. This is a good chance to practice the cat hissing into an “ewww” sound exercise to help with voicing– it should sound like “hhhhheeeeeewwww” if done correctly, with the air pointing down across the chin at the end and the tongue still high in the middle of the mouth.
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About Dr. Alexandra Doyle
Dr. Alexandra Doyle is the Assistant Professor of Clarinet at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, where she serves as the resident music historian, Taylor Swift-ologist, and director of the NSU CommUniversity Band. Previously, she taught at Sinclair College, Thomas More University, and the Stivers School for the Arts in the Cincinnati-Dayton area. Alexandra is both a clarinetist with and marketing director for the Taneycomo Festival Orchestra, as well as an author and musicologist, with bylines appearing in The Clarinet Magazine, Vandoren WAVE, and Oxford’s forthcoming Handbook of Wind Music. She has performed with a variety of symphony orchestras, including the Tulsa Symphony, Arkansas Symphony, and Illinois Symphony. She earned her graduate degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and her bachelor’s degrees from the University of Houston. Alexandra is a Vandoren Artist-Clinician and Buffet Crampon Artist.