How to Make Your Aerophone Sound Like a Real Cello: 3 Tips

The Piece

The Song & Guide Book has three pieces played with string sounds, violin and cello: "Air on the G String," "Merry-Go-Round of Life," and "Jonetsu Tairiku."

All three are difficult. And two of them, "Merry-Go-Round of Life" and "Jonetsu Tairiku," are still under copyright, so I cannot post a recording of them here.

So I used "The Swan" by Saint-Saëns instead. It is in the public domain. I worked with the first four measures.

The actual pitch sounds one octave lower than written.

The Setup

I used the same settings for all three recordings. The only thing I changed was how I played.

Before I Studied How a Cello Is Played (① and ②)

① After listening to the source two or three times and practicing a few times

② After listening to a cello recording of "The Swan" many times, audio only, and practicing for about 30 minutes

I recorded this several times, putting in all the expression I had at that point, trying to get close to the original.

You can see it in the waveform too: in ②, I added dynamics mainly in the second half.

But it still sounds like a wind instrument that sounds like a cello.

After I Studied How a Cello Is Played (③)

I looked into how string instruments are played and what their sound is like. I watched many performance videos on YouTube, and in the end I used Yo-Yo Ma's performance as my model.

I studied the details: how a note starts, how it ends, how vibrato is applied (the timing and the finger movement), and how the bow is drawn and turned.

③ After about an hour of watching and practicing, here is the result.

(It came out a little louder than ① and ②.)

It is different from ②. It sounds a little more like a string instrument.

Of course, I had practiced ③ more than the others. But I could feel that the points below were what made the difference.

Starting the Note

I take Aerophone lessons from a saxophone teacher, so the way I play comes from the saxophone. That means I normally start a note with tonguing.

A string instrument starts a note very smoothly. So I stopped tonguing, and started each note from the smallest sound I could make.

The hard part is that playing this way tends to make me fall behind the beat.

Ending the Note

On a wind instrument, the sound stops when you stop the air. On a string instrument, the sound continues as long as the bow is moving.

So instead of letting a note stop suddenly, I kept it going down to the smallest sound I could make.

That makes the timing of a breath difficult, and it leaves less time to breathe.

Dynamics Within a Note

On a string instrument, dynamics come from how the bow is drawn.

As I mentioned at the start, in the Song & Guide Book demo recordings every single note carried the dynamics of a bow. I had noticed this before, on other wind instruments as well as the Aerophone. When I listen to professionals and to my teacher, every single note has its own dynamics.

Until now, I had not paid attention to every single note that way.

This time the piece was slow, and I listened to the recording many times, trying to reproduce the dynamics of each note. In long notes especially, what happens inside the note matters.

This turned out to be valuable for my Aerophone playing in general.

How to Apply Vibrato

In the videos, string players apply vibrato with a movement of the finger, and they start it a moment after the note begins.

The Cello Vib sound has vibrato built in, as the name says. And it does not start right away. It comes in once you have put a little air through, which is a beautifully judged design.

When I added the third tip, dynamics within a note, to the long notes, the vibrato came out smoothly.

The Aerophone never stops surprising me.

On the Aerophone you can apply vibrato by changing how hard you bite the mouthpiece. But with this sound, I did not need to apply it myself.

In fact, when I tried to bite the mouthpiece to apply vibrato, I tensed, and I could no longer concentrate on my fingers or my breathing.

When to Turn the Bow

A string instrument can connect the notes. An instrument that uses air always needs a breath, so where you take that breath becomes a real problem.

This score had rests in it, so I did not need to do anything special about breathing. But in a piece where the notes sound almost all connected, like the "Air on the G String" that Mr. Fujimoto used as his example, the breaths have to go somewhere.

A bow cannot go on forever either. At some point the player has to lift it or change its direction, and the sound changes slightly there. I think those are the places to put a breath.