How to Play the Bassoon
How to play

On the bassoon, there are many ways to produce notes of the same pitch but using different fingering. By changing the fingering used, it's possible to produce sounds of the same pitch but with a more gentle timbre, or soft, "pianissimo" sounds. For that reason, searching for new fingering combinations is something that bassoonists often enjoy. Learning obscure, secret fingering combinations from teachers and more experienced players can be something akin to an initiation into the bassoonist's craft!
Let's listen to five variations of an E♭ and three variations of an F♯, each produced with different fingering.

The treble clef and bass clef are not uncommon, but there may be many people who have only rarely read musical notation on the C clef, or who have never seen it at all. When drawing a treble clef, we start from the G line, the bass clef starts from the F line. The pointed central part of the C clef points at middle C. For the bassoon, which has a range that extends over three octaves, a musical score that is usually written on the treble clef would soon extend into horizontal "ledger lines" for high-pitched notes, and become difficult to read, so is instead usually transposed onto the C clef. The C clef is also referred to as the alto clef, or the tenor clef, depending on the vertical positioning of the staff location. The diagram shows how the same three notes, of C, G and high C, appear when written on the four different clefs.