One shouldn't really ask the question of whether anybody needs the instrument or not. All we really need is food and shelter and everything else has been invented for the fun of it. I am as fascinated by this instrument as I am by the superbone and it's playing.

Mozart and Schubert both loved this instrument. It is played in the last act of ‘Idomeneo’ and in Schubert’s third symphony.

Playing high notes, the Lupophone's timbre reminds me of an altoon or octave bassoon, but with more directness and clarity.

The cable operated octave key is crazy

How does that all work on a Mac? Also, how do you recover the score when it disappears after switching to individual parts by pressing the "W" key? Thanks!

As an (amateur) composer, this thing sounds amazing. I'm going to have to write some stuff for it.

Great Video... Thank You for Sharing

"In time people might prefer to own a Lupophone to a heckelphone." wow contrast this when I was a kid, even a heckelphone was a mythical instrument..

It would be really interesting to have a lupophone side-by-side with a baritone sarrusophone (range: C2-Bb4, so it's lacking the fourth octave of the lupophone).

I play Bass clarinet![proud]

This is excellent - Thank you!

It lacks the timbre of the oboe

An acoustic instrument that sounds like a synth!

Interesting tidbit: - According to a compilation on the official Heckelphone site, there's 79 Heckelphones that we know the location of (out of 156 total, plus two more to come in the next few years) - When John McDougall received his Lupophone in 2023, it was marked as serial number #12

With Strauss' Alpine Symphony, he was most certainly anticipating a Low F Heckelphone in the future (i.e. he didn't have a Low F instrument available to him). The theory is that Heckel planned to make longer extensions for their Heckelphones, but WWI and WWII both got in the way. But yeah, that piece is also why the Lupophone goes to Low F

Has a nice sound.

Hi! The Vibrato Font is your creation? In my version i don't have it.

I’m glad you covered it. I never found a good enough video on the lupophone.

Sehr gut! I liebe Lupophone gern!

I didn't think there was much of a Heckelphone market to be worried about. The Lupophone seems like it may get more life as an instrument in its own right and just incidentally happen to be a better ensemble instrument than whatever it's standing in for. Bass oboes will continue to exist as long as The Planets is popular, but Heckelphone doesn't seem to have as rosy a future. I also could see this being used as a jazz instrument, because in some ways it's like you took a soprano sax and gave it another octave and a third on the bottom.

If it's the lowest, why not call it the Loboe? or the Bass version, the Boboe?

I wanted to invent the Poopophone - only there's already plenty of low woodwind and brass instruments that sound like shite when in the wrong hands.

In its time, the Saxophone went through a tumultuous beginning, facing vehement push back from traditionalists who objected to the new instrument.

I love all the woodwinds, so another register is quite welcome. This timbre is wonderful! I have to say, in its lowest range it echoes the bassoon, and in midrange, the saxophone. But in both cases it possesses a distinct personality.

When I was a kid, books were saying that the reason nobody made low oboes is because either they thought there was no point since the bassoon already existed or that it would sound like a bassoon. The lupophone sounds like its own instrument! It has a lot if power and it plays very in tune.

I consider the lupophone a baritone instrument. For it to begin for me to consider it a bass instrument, I believe it would need to descend down to C2 instead of F2.

It looks like if a bass clarinet and a cor anglais had a baby

Lupophone > Baritone Oboe > Heckelphone

I wanna buy a lupophon

I can't believe it was only until the high E that the timbre started sounding noticeably strained. O.O

My observation is that this isn't really the lowest oboe -- the Contraforte (by Eppelsheim) is, since it sounds more like a subcontrabass oboe than a contrabassoon, and it seems reasonable that a composer could call for both Contraforte and contrabassoon as distinct instruments.

It sounds like a bassoon, but with a richer sound.

I love it! 🥰

Pains me how badly I want to play this instrument

As an oboist, I am happy to see more coverage of the lupophone! Thank you

Bedtime postponed

The range of this instrument is quite impressive and it seems that the expressiveness of it is quite wide also. I'm looking forward to hearing a lot more from it.

I will admit that I am old school (for the most part). My interest is in what music up to the 20th century might have been if modern instruments were available. In that vein, I would love to see a revival of Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Impressionistic period ideas with the expanded tonal and instrumental variety available today. I am constantly dismayed that the International Clarinet Association is so obsessed with Contemporary _noise_ and effects over interesting and even "beautiful" _music_ -there is a constant influx of contemporary "music" coming in and, go figure, a slow loss of interest in art music.

I had no idea. *Thank you for expanding my understanding.* _Of course, I've come to expect nothing less from this channel._

awesome video! Can you make a video talking about contra and subcontrabass saxophones? A good person to reach out to is Paul Cohen!

02:43 Lady Ga....

I don't have the little arrowed corner underneath the lines section. How can I then access the "Edit Lines" menu?

it doesnt work for me, if i write halfdim7 it doesnt change the text to the half dim symbol :(

the Eb alto clarinet has yet again been forgotten

This is awesome. Of course, I'm going to subscribe.

Just seeing this now. Thanks, KZbin Algorithm! 😠 Anyway, this is important in audio engineering as well. One of the quickest ways to make a muddy, confused mix is to totally ignore the science in the sound and hope for the best. And to quote Rocky J. Squirrel, "That trick never works!". You can keep the fundamental ranges in a mix under control with relative ease, but if you don't acknowledge problems in the partials starting around the 5th harmonic, you're going to potentially wind up with a mess. Let's say you've got a track with some heavy bass and thick pads over that. There's maybe the distance of a twelfth between them and for the life of you, you CANNOT manage to get them to play nice in the mix. So, a twelfth up from the bass's fundamental is that track's overtone gamut beyond octave intervals. But this is ALSO where the fundamentals of the pad track are. Also, those fundamentals and the bass's harmonics might be interfering with each other in even higher partials of BOTH tracks. Result? Well, whatever it is, it's going to be a mess. Every hit of the bass against the pad track will be "unsharpened" because the timbral content of the bass doesn't play nice with the pad and its own harmonics...which in any pad-type track are going to be pretty thick. The solution is simple: use an RTA...a Real-Time Analyzer. These are easily had as freeware, and I have them installed in both of my tracking DAWs. So when I run into cruddy-sounding interplay, MY reaction is to use that RTA to see if the combo is creating "lumps" via reinforcement and cancellation of the mixed signals. Once you know where the offending "lump" is, it becomes much easier to mix the two and get a GOOD result. Dip things in the bass around the pad's fundamental, then dip the initial ranges of the pad's harmonics...these allow you to "tweeze apart" the two via a good ol' parametric EQ on each. These ideas first hit me during my undergrad Orchestration class back in the mid-1980s, and I ran them past both my orch prof and my composition prof...and they both encouraged me to explore that concept further. So I did. Later that semester, I set up a few common "problems" while using the University's recording studio and its cantankerous Harrison desk...and wouldn't you know it? The idea DID work! I use that technique all the time now, using EQ cuts to make "carve-outs" for different tracks when the "mud" threatens the mix. And it's possible these days to use an EQ plug-in in the DAW itself for even more precise results, if needed. I suggest a couple of books...one is our orchestration text, Rimsky-Korsakov's venerable book. But the other is firmly in the zone between acoustic science and music, and that's Helmholtz's "On the Sensation of Tone". Mash 'em together, and you wind up with a HOST of possible tricks for mixing... ...which is a good equivalent to orchestration, when you think about it. Runs "the whole circle round"! 👍

very useful! thanks!

Xenakis and Ferneyhough are so skilled composers they can make music that is not just impossible to play, but also impossible to listen to.

I really would like a video about the differences between all the G models : clarinet d’amore, cor de basset in G, turkish klarnet in G... What sets them appart from eachother?

Who’s here in 2025