Author: Gordon (NZ)
Date: 2010-07-16 08:59
You need a lot of blow to blow up a balloon. That,to me, is far too much blow for detecting leaks. There is nowhere near that pressure inside a clarinet during normal playing.
For a blow test, the idea IMO is to block the back of the throat with the tongue, then use the rest of the tongue to push a small quantity (say 1/4 - 1/2 a mouthful) of air GENTLY into the section of clarinet. It is by doing this that one can easily detect how quickly the air is escaping, by how much the tongue has to travel, pushing the air out of the mouth, in order to maintain pressure.
As for sucking versus blowing... Imagine a damp bed of sand, and how much easier it is to suck air through it than it is to blow air through it. The very slight porosity of the timber and pad membrane, IMO, makes it act a bit like a bed of sand. So I think sucking is a rather unreliable test, especially if that draws the pad membrane to making a seal, as somebody has already mentioned.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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