Klarinet Archive - Posting 000242.txt from 2003/08
From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Mouthpiece patches, stiff upper lip
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2003 07:55:46 -0400
Russell Harlow wrote,
>If you play with your teeth on the mouthpiece, no
>matter how lightly, you will get scratches. But I
>have seen mouthpieces that have very large grooves
>in them,as I'm sure you have (I almost bit through
>one myself when I was a student) and thats the problem.
You've brought up a reason why some of us who play vintage or antique
clarinets use a mouthpiece patch. If I'm the original owner of a
mouthpiece and I gnaw it up, at least the grooves fit my own teeth, but
when I use somebody's 75-year-old mouthpiece (as I do most of the time now
because modern mouthpieces play out of tune on my Buffets from the 1930s),
the grooves are in the wrong place for me and they mess with my embouchure.
They also mess with my brain, because for me there's a bit of a distracting
yuck-factor in feeling somebody else's tooth marks, even though the
mouthpiece is thoroughly clean. (I would much rather think about the music
than involuntarily imagine the unknown original owner as a mouthful of
rotting brown fang-stumps loose in their festering gums....) I don't fill
the grooves because I don't want to swallow plastic if/when the fillers
detach from the mouthpiece. A mouthpiece patch covers up all tooth-grooves
and is easy to replace when necessary. That's the main reason I use a
patch on a soprano clarinet. I went ahead and put patches on my modern
mouthpieces, too, just because now I'm used to the feel of the patches and
prefer to cut down on the variables.
I use a patch on my bass saxophone for a different reason: It vibrates
like a jackhammer, especially in the lower octave, and teeth on the
mouthpiece conduct the vibrations all too well. Most uncomfortable. It
seemed to me that I was hearing distorted sound that way, and I also got a
headache from playing the old brain-rattler, until I started using double
lip embouchure *and* a mouthpiece patch. With the idea of cutting down on
variables again, I did try out double lip on smaller saxophones and on
clarinets (my largest clarinet is an alto), but this change was not a
success. I'm so accustomed to single lip on clarinet, after playing that
way from the age of nine, that it's more practical to keep my old habits on
clarinet and switch embouchures for bass sax. The bass sax mouthpiece is
so enormous compared to a clarinet mouthpiece that I have to change my
embouchure radically anyway, so there's no danger of confusing myself on
clarinet by switching to double lip only on bass sax. There's no problem
about supporting the instrument, either, because I use a support stand for
the bass. Does a contrabass clarinet vibrate that way?
Lelia Loban
E-mail: lelialoban@-----.net
Web site (original music scores as audio or print-out):
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/LeliaLoban
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