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Kind of off-topic, but ironically the saxophone is probably the most optimal of the woodwind instruments. It was designed much later than the others, and so Sax was able to take the best parts of the others and avoid all the annoying bits. The saxophone, for example, overblows an octave rather than a twelfth like the clarinet, so you can use the same fingerings in both registers. There's also only one key to be pressed by the thumb, unlike the 13 (!) for the bassoon (9 for the left thumb, 4 for the right). This engineering is one of the reasons all of the saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor, bari, etc.) have a similar sound, whereas (say), all the members of the clarinet family sound pretty different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxophone#History

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That's a fascinating comment! As a piano and guitar player only, I have little to no understanding of other instruments. I was shocked when watching Whiplash that drums needed to be tuned to particular keys.

This reminded me of a really fun talk from this year dealing with teaching (and internalizing) music theory using a Ruby DSL: http://confreaks.tv/videos/mwrc2015-writing-music-with-ruby-...

> There's also only one key to be pressed by the thumb, unlike the 13 (!) for the bassoon

Surely a middle ground would be preferable. One of the biggest shortcomings of the modern keyboard is that each thumb is essentially responsible for only a single key each, while the thumb is by far the most flexible and strongest of the digits.

That's true. Part of the problem is that for the smaller woodwinds, the right thumb is responsible for holding the weight of the instrument. When a clarinetist is playing an open G, no keys are depressed, and so the instrument is supported only by the mouth and the right thumb.

The reason the left thumb has so few (saxophone and flute each have one, clarinet has two, oboes have one or two, bassoon is an anomaly) is because it usually operates the register key, which has to be held down much of the time while the other fingers do most of the work (not unlike a shift key for typing capitals). Having the left thumb do this is much easier than, say, the pinky, since you lose a lot of dexterity in your ring finger if the pinky has to stay depressed.

Some less common instruments do have more thumb keys; high-end bass clarinets have an extended low register and the two additional notes are operated by the right thumb. Bass clarinet typically uses a peg or a neckstrap, so the thumb is freed up a little bit to do some work.

(For a moment I forgot the main topic of the thread was computer keyboards and thought you had very strange piano technique!)

Interesting; so it sounds like rather than ignoring how thumbs work (like computer keyboards) they choose to take advantage of the thumb's superior strength rather than its flexibility.

Right. It probably also has to do with the fact that it's optimized for speed. The thumb is flexible, but not particularly fast. Many of the thumb keys on the bassoon are for notes that aren't played often, or alternate fingerings that are more in tune than the standard ones, and can be swapped out for other fingerings when speed is required.

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