Klarinet Archive - Posting 000792.txt from 1996/02

From: Bill Fogle <bfogle@-----.EDU>
Subj: b/f# changes with joint alignment (?)
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 17:17:00 -0500

My no-frills Buffet R13 is beginning to show signs of use. A few days ago
I assembled my instrument and began practicing. The chal. b (or clarion
f# ) wasn't coming through. I investigated pads until my vision blurred.
I concentrated on covering the tone hole accurately. All to no avail.
Quite by accident, I rotated the top joint counter-clockwise a bit. The
note made a full recovery. Now fully in Experiment Mode, I made the same
degree of shift clockwise. This "worsened" the tone. I find this
fascinating because I was unable to reproduce this phenomenon on any
other clarinet. Also, this is the first time in three years of pretty
casual joint aligning that I've encountered a problem. I'm more than a
bit hesitant to post this because I'm afraid the "discovery" I've made is
basic: I changed the physics of the instrument. But, what does puzzle me
is that it has never happened before. Maybe I need to start putting
pencil notches on the joints where the alignment "plays" the best!

***********************
Bill Fogle
Washington, DC
bfogle@-----.edu
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