 The Clarinet BBoard
|
Author: Tony F
Date: 2016-04-21 03:29
Some years ago I looked at my clarinet barrel and thought "What can be so difficult about this? It's just basic wood-turning 101".
Since then I've produced about 3 barrels that actually worked and quite a lot of decorative firewood. My successes have been achieved by luck and slavishly copying one that works with no real understanding of why it works.
I've experimented along the way with reverse taper, parallel bore, polycylindrical bore with some success and I'm gradually coming to an understanding of how much I don't know.
Do you know of any text which is a distillation of the barrel makers art, or did other barrel makers travel the same road as me?
My failures were not entirely wasted, I pass them on the a friend who is a custom knife maker and he uses them as knife handle scales.
Tony F.
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: Caroline Smale
Date: 2016-04-21 03:55
I guess that the barrel really has to be seen as part of the total clarinet system so an understanding of clarinet acoustics is probably fundamental.
Benade's book on musical instrument acoustics is likely to be one foundation of this understanding with it's desriptions of nodes/antinodes and the way perturbations in various parts of the bore affect those and their influences on the tuning of the harmonic structure.
I bought a copy many years back, not sure I quite worked all the way through it yet, very interesting but not an easy read.
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: ClaV
Date: 2016-04-21 14:54
Benade is an amazing treŠ°tise, though it does not go into subtle bore effects including barrels.
There are few very useful words of Stephen Fox and good references there: http://www.sfoxclarinets.com/baclac_art.htm
I've collected and measured quite a few barrels and am reasonably convinced that the measurements themselves are not very sophisticated. The precision required is definitely high (I've only tried to adjust existing barrels a bit)
Yet, the barrel connects a mouthpiece with an oscillating reed and a clarinet, and those two are quite different/disjointed acoustically. So the right barrel is really for a given mouthpiece, reed and a player; one of the common example of the specific barrels is to correct for a mouthpiece effect.
Post Edited (2016-04-21 17:08)
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
The Clarinet Pages
|
 |
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
