Klarinet Archive - Posting 000150.txt from 1998/07
From: Kenneth Wolman <kwolman@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] reeds
Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1998 09:22:20 -0400
>>I'd say go for the cheap stuff in the beginning.....around the second year
>>move up to higher-quality and medium reeds. Rico reeds are exellent, I use
>>them now. Don't buy LaVoz though, I find Rico works better.
>>
>If La Voz reeds don't work for you, don't buy them. But to snipe at them
>at the same time you are defending Ricos smacks of hypocrisy.
In one of my earlier incarnations, 10 years ago, as a semiprofessional
photographer, I used to run into this kind of equipmentology also. Not
just "Mine's bigger than yours," but "Mine is great and yours sucks." If
you wanted to Be In Uniform, you had to show up with Nikons even if you
couldn't quite afford them; Canons might also do, but then there wasn't
much else that didn't get you pinned as an amateur. Minolta? For your
vacation in Puerto Rico! Pentax? For your niece's wedding! But at the
same time, showing up with REALLY expensive cameras like Leicas marked you
as an unpleasant showoff and people were likely to whisper the word
"Pendejo!" behind your back.
So now that I've gotten back into music in the last six or seven months,
I'm discovering the same kind of equipmentological manias (how's that for
an over the top phrase?:-), and I almost became part of it. Buffet seems
to be the standard, at least in New York, and LeBlanc has been marketing
itself aggressively through its "celebrity endorsers" like Daniels, Combs,
and Morales. I don't think Yamaha beats the drum over Buddy DeFranco or
Bruce Yeh. Selmer, at least in my memory, did not make THAT big a deal
about Benny Goodman or Anthony Gigliotti: yeah, there's a Goodman poster,
but I don't think Gigliotti ever posed with a horn.
I think I freaked out a salesman at Sam Ash when I went into a practice
room to try out a LeBlanc Concerto, played for about 20 minutes, came out
and said "It's real fine but I don't hear anything in it that makes it
better than my Centered Tone." He looked at me like I'd missed Marshall
Applewhite's group being picked up by the mother ship. Yet they have
Selmer Recital clarinets on display, brand new, and probably have 10Gs and
Signatures in the back room.
If I buy another clarinet at at the end of the year, it will probably be
another high-end Selmer in A rather than a middle-end LeBlanc or Buffet
just for the name. Why? This brings me back to another photographer, a
guy named Djon Mili, who said "The equipment you know is the equipment you
like." Ta-da. I know Selmer, I like Selmer. Which doesn't mean I'm not
curious about trying out comparable horns from Buffet or LeBlanc or Yamaha
or Howarth or Eaton, etc., etc. It just means that I'm not going to say
"Selmer is great, everything else sucks." It just means I like what I
knowm, and for all I know I might discover that I play better on one of the
others.
Reeds are a lot cheaper to try than intruments. But if you get what you
want out of a Rico, then what is the big deal, and why attack someone's
choice if that is what he or she prefers?
(So what does Drucker play??:-)
Ken
Kenneth Wolman Information Technology Morgan Stanley Inc.
750 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 212-762-1685
My unpaid life: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/1649
"I only wish I could write with both hands, so as not to forget
one thing while I am saying another." -- St. Teresa of Avila
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