Best clarinet books for beginners

If a school is involved, buy the method the school named — for clarinet that is more likely to be true than for any other instrument we cover. Clarinet is usually the biggest section in a beginning band, which means the method was chosen for the whole program long before you read the supply list. Outside a program, the choice is real and it comes down to two things: the Rubank#ad is the cheapest serious method in print, and Accent on Achievement#ad explains the most per page.

Every pick states its Starter Path band, and we have not played any of them — the method is on how we pick. Authors, page counts, levels and ISBNs come from Hal Leonard’s and Alfred’s own product pages, cited at the bottom.

Clarinet is the instrument where the book is usually already decided

It is worth being explicit about this, because it changes what a buying page can usefully tell you. Beginning bands are built around clarinets: they are affordable to rent, they fit small hands better than a saxophone, and a school can put fifteen of them in a room. That means the method is a program-level decision, made by a director ordering fifteen matching books, and a parent buying a different publisher has not bought a better book — they have bought a book whose page 22 is not the page 22 being called out.

So the first action is not to buy anything. It is to find out whether a title was named. If one was, that is the answer, and the rest of this page is about what to add second.

The picks

Essential Elements for Band, Bb Clarinet Book 1#ad is the statistical default. Hal Leonard publishes 48 pages at 9 by 12 inches, softcover with online EE Interactive media, six named authors, and states that new editions work side by side with previous copies — which matters when a sibling’s old copy is already in the house. Buy this if the school named Essential Elements or named nothing. Skip it if the director named Kjos or Alfred.

The Rubank Elementary Method, Clarinet#ad is 48 pages edited by N.W. Hovey and is normally the cheapest serious method you can buy for any band instrument at all. Graded, sequential, and visually bare. For an adult beginner working alone that bareness is irrelevant and the price and ordering are the point. Buy this if they are teaching themselves, or you want a second book to work through alongside the class. Skip it if the student is a child who needs the page to look like something.

Accent on Achievement, Book 1#ad is 48 pages by John O’Reilly and Mark Williams, graded by Alfred as beginning, with online audio and software included rather than sold separately. Of the three it spends the most space explaining rather than drilling, which is the right trade for a student who sees a teacher once a week. Buy this if nobody is directing and you want the book that does the most teaching. Skip it if the school runs a different method — and check the item number, because the German-insert edition 00-17084G is a different, 64-page product.

The squeak, which is what you actually came here about

Nearly every first-year clarinet household has the same complaint, and no book on this page addresses it, so here is the short version.

A clarinet squeaks for two main reasons. The first is a reed that is too stiff for the embouchure the player currently has — the single commonest cause, and the cheapest to test, because a three-reed box costs very little. The second is air escaping at the corners of the mouth, which is a technique problem and needs a person, not a page.

That is why the band method cannot help: it is written for a classroom learning in unison and assumes a director is standing in the room correcting embouchures one at a time. Our beginner reeds page covers the strength question properly, and reeds explained covers why a warped reed makes a clarinet sound suddenly bad for no visible reason.

What we did not list, and why

Klosé. The Celebrated Method for the Clarinet is a genuine reference work and completely wrong for a first year — it is a conservatory book, and a beginner opening it finds exercises they cannot play.

Standard of Excellence for clarinet. A legitimate method, and on this site: it appears as a pick on our saxophone books page. Putting a fourth interchangeable classroom method on this page would not help you choose, because the choice belongs to the director.

Unbranded “easy clarinet” songbooks. The ones we checked have no named author with a teaching credential and no publisher page to verify a page count against. We do not list what we cannot check.