Klarinet Archive - Posting 000852.txt from 2002/10

From: "Joseph Wakeling" <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] This thing on my front door
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 05:14:30 -0500

> the mouthpiece cannot correct the deficiency of the reed.

About a month ago I bought a new box of reeds, and was very disappointed to
find that there wasn't a single one in the box that I thought was any good.
They either produced a bad sound or they were ridiculously hard to blow, or
both.

Anyway, not long after this I switched mouthpiece. There was nothing
particularly wrong with my old mouthpiece, but I'd been thinking about
trying out some new ones just to see what was out there. I found one I
liked better than my old one and bought it.

Then I came back to this box of reeds. And suddenly I found that almost
*all* of them were usable. Not all were usable in a concert situation but
certainly from a "practise" point of view; and some of them had suddenly
become excellent.

What was at fault? It would have been cheaper and probably just as
effective to simply buy a few new boxes of reeds. I was getting perfectly
good results with the same brand of reed on my old mouthpiece; it was just
this box that I had a problem with.

There was nothing wrong with either the reeds or the old mouthpiece, it was
just that *together* they didn't work. So even if you choose to chop up
your clarinet into mouthpiece-reed-ligature-etc., it just goes to show that
the definition of a "bad" or "deficient" reed can be relative to the
mouthpiece, and vice versa - and so the whole question of which is "more
important" becomes relative too.

-- Joe

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