Author: Terry Stibal
Date: 2004-09-17 01:54
...for good harmony clarinet playing is to ensure that you have a solid, leak-free instrument. If at all humanly possible, get an instrument assigned to you and you alone, then spend the money (yours if necessary) to get it properly set up (particularly the saucer-like lower joint pads). Then, keep it in your control and away from the hands of others (take it home at night, in other words), and handle it like it was made of eggshells.
I've taught about thirty clarinet students over the year, and many of those were high schoolers who had been transferred over to the harmony horns. There's nothing more frustrating for a serious student than to play on a "common" school horn, one shared by three or four students. When they get to use your instrument, which is treated the right way, and they can now run up and down the range without squeaks and chirps, it's like watching the sun rise. Once that problem is eliminated, the school policy of purchasing your own mouthpiece allows you to take care of the other "problem area" and it's all down hill from there.
(True school instrument "repair" story:
Once, when I was between baritones, I had to borrow a local school's Selmer Mark VI equivalent to do a traveling show. It was a matter of picking the horn up at 4:00 PM, driving seventy odd miles to the theater and performing at 8:00 PM, meal not included.
While at the theater doing the set up work, I gave the bari a quick once over and noticed that it was as bashed up as you would expect a school horn to be. However, one bit of damage that was impossible to work around was the low D hole (covered by the C key, LF RH). This particular tone hole is very exposed to damage, and on the sax in question it (and the surrounding keyguard) were literally mangled. So bad was the damage that the horn would not play low C# and below.
As the show had an extensive section of basement work, low A and its neighbors were essential to the part. No instrument repair kit in sight...what to do?
I am almost ashamed to report that the solution was to pull the key, very carefully reform the tone hole rim with _a pair of Vice Grip pliers_ (shudder) and two pads of paper (to protect the already corrugated tonehole edge , and then wedge the replaced key shut during the bass line section with a cut up champagne cork (courtesy of a Conn sax player who kept a couple of spares in his case).
Crude, perhaps brutal, but it worked. Some measure of the original damage can be made when you consider that the "repair" was close enough to work without the cork, once a real repairman got to leveling the key to hole interface the next day.
School horns...what are you gonna do???)
Anyway...
For those bass clarinet students who were really dedicated, I always tried to pull the parents in the direction of buying their own "student grade" horn, mostly for the avoidance of the frustration that comes with horn sharing. It's a bit more of a financial commitment than a student Bb, but parents who saw the potential revealed when their child was able to achieve far more on a well set up horn were usually willing to do so.
Of course, we all know that the alto clarinet is a tool of Satan, etc. But the same principles still obtain. I hope it's not one with open tone holes; one of our districts was still using such a horn back in the 1970's, and they never could find a kid able to seal things up right...
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