"look at all those chickens!"
just had to send an email to a music theory website that has a page about the family of clarinet instruments (they come in at least 16 sizes and pitches) because they fucked up the description of the Eb and Alto Eb clarinets
instruments like clarinets are called transposing instruments*, because they don't play at the pitch they're written at - so with a Bb clarinet, a written C sounds a concert Bb (a whole tone lower than written)
and with an Eb clarinet, a written C sounds a concert Eb (a minor third higher than written, a whole tone plus a half tone upwards)
the web page says
Not quite as common but still found in orchestras is the Eb Clarinet, again called so because when you play an Eb it sounds a concert C.
which is exactly backwards
we will be interested to see what they say, it felt like a slop hallucination, but may also be a human fuckup
anyway, we're really pleased to see that our proofreading bullshit alert is still fully functional (except on our own writing ofc)
the main transposing instruments are clarinets and saxes and oboes and brass - the oboe family is even more nuts than the clarinet one in our opinion - and it's often because they come in families, and transposing the music means the musician can play the same fingering on all their instruments when reading the music
*if you want to know the fuller reason for transposing instruments in the first place, you can read this article - our brain cannot explain all this today but it kind of makes some sense
