Klarinet Archive - Posting 000228.txt from 2003/09

From: GrabnerWG@-----.com
Subj: Re: [kl] C clarinet mouthpiece
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 11:25:53 -0400

Nothing against Ralph Morgan, or his mouthpieces, but I (and many others, Greg Smith for one) strongly recommend using the same mouthpiece on C, as you do on your Bb and A. Look in the archives, we have discussed this before.

Why go through the trouble of having additional ligatures and reeds for a seperate mouthpiece? Almost anytime you play C clarinet, in an orchestra at least, it's a doubling instrument. Why risk a dry reed and embochure change as well as a cold instrument when you pick up your C, when you don't have to? Most C clarinets have a bore maximized to use a normal soprano clarinet mouthpiece.

Having said that, I will say that there some soprano clarinet mouthpieces work better on a C clarinet then others. For example, from my "stable" my CXZ_AW works better on my C clarinet than my "CXZ_SW1". The deeper, narrower baffle on my SW1 mouthpiece (which makes it work so well on Yamaha and Leblanc Opus and Concerto models), seems to lower the throat tones on my Buffet C clarinet unacceptably.

I have had the opportunity to examine and work on quite a few C clarinets in the past three years to correct tuning anomalies. The problem I have seem most often is a barrel bore diameter that is just too big for the rest of the instrument. Many people have these barrels shortened to compensate for the resulting flatness in the throat register, but that just throws other notes too sharp, with a messed up scale as a result. In a similar manner, people ask for a "shortened" Bb/A mouthpiece to accomodate the problem. Thus the C clarinet mouthpiece.....

The best successes I have seen in tuning a wild C clarinet is to use a normal soprano clarinet mouthpiece and a new barrel with a narrower but longer bore. Using a reverse taper in the bore helps considerably. The C clarinet barrels I have measured all seem to be completely cylindrical.

(This may be the source of the problem, as most clarinet mouthpieces out there assume a reverse taper bore in the barrel. Certainly mouthpieces made from Zinner blanks do. For sure, the most popular "replacement barrels", such as Buffet-Moennig, and Chadash are reverse taper. I think Pyne and Fobes barrels are too.)

There are of course, many C clarinets floating around out there and I can't claim that this is a cure for all or most. Probably each needs to be looked at individually.

Walter Grabner
www.ClarinetXpress.com
clarinet repairs, mouthpieces, and other neat stuff

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