The Clarinet BBoard

Re: Mouthpiece for Buffet Festival

Author: ThatPerfectReed  Date:   2014-03-01 01:16 Mr Small nailed it. What is not happening for you with an M30 that you hope other mouthpieces will solve. What if anything do you like about the M30? How long have you played it? Why did you move to it or was it your first mouthpiece? What genre of clarinet playing are you focusing your energy towards? Do you dislike your sound, ease of play, intonation, speed of articulation, inability for your sound to travel? Are you looking for a mouthpiece to solve a reed problem...a finger problem, etc. Kindly share more of your clarinet story with us?

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Re: Mouthpiece for Buffet Festival

Author: ThatPerfectReed  Date:   2014-03-05 18:40 Karl: you are an esteemed colleague here. I’ve enjoyed and benefitted from your contributions. Let me offer an example of what I think is a mouthpiece compensating for bad technique: it’s something I did as a young player, but only realized later, as well as something I’ve seen students do. A difficult staccato passage is about to arise in a piece they’re preparing for an audition. I know the student’s had difficulty with it in the past. Immediately, my focus turns to the embouchure and fingers: both of which instinctively clamp up, which ironically—need I tell you—is the opposite of what we’d want to happen when a player’s faced with a difficult phrase. So I assign something out of "Klose" or "Rose" (or "Lazarus," or whatever) to the student, and explain why this “boring stuff” is relevant to their performance piece. But time is limited to practice, and sometimes assignments in the study books take a back seat to doing “the cool stuff;” I get that as much as I wish it could be different. On more than one occasion, with the near instinctiveness of the way they clamped up on the passage, I find them at next week’s lesson sporting a new mouthpiece with a more open facing that compensates for their tendency to bite, and their less than lackluster stacatto. Now, staccato that couldn’t be done before is all but manageable. Nevermind they now squeak on the new hardware where they haven’t before, and their intonation, as well as the inner core of their sound has gone to pot. This is my idea of hardware (a mouthpiece) compensating for bad technique. And yet, your notion that “…a mouthpiece can only support or interfere with a player’s application of good technique” is not wrong either, as other attributes of their play, as I’ve reported, have taken a hit. This new mouthpiece is affecting their reed strength choice (now too strong), sound, pitch, and playing reliability (squeaking)—i.e. interfering with their technique as you aptly write. While on my soapbox let me also say I am by no means against the (careful) exploration of hardware—most specifically mouthpieces. In fact temporarily changing equipment lets us gauge the extent to which a problem with play may be our own abilities, or our ability on a particular mouthpiece. It’s when it becomes an activity that takes away from time in front of the music stand that concerns me. Equally important, I get worried when experienced players tend to offer a solution simply because it’s in their area of expertise—i.e. the so called “a carpenter sees problems as solvable with a hammer and nail” way of thinking, and a mouthpiece expert suggests a mouthpiece change. You are absolutely correct that my choice of words, in saying a mouthpiece can “make a player,” was a product of misunderstanding arising from my failure to use better language. A mouthpiece can facilitate a player, but no mouthpiece I know can even turn an elementary school Julian Bliss into the young (pre?) teen who did Messenger’s Solo De Concurs for the Queen’s Jubilee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG9D8JjlGow. Yes, Mr. Cult should try mouthpieces out, but I’m not sure we agree on why. Without more about his playing known to me, my reasoning for his conducting mouthpiece trials is so that trying mouthpieces might not only find him something more suitable, but at least equally important, if it doesn’t, suggest that his articulation problems, regardless of mouthpiece used, should (always be) worked on at the practice stand, and not always the music store. And I am certainly not implying that anyone here disagrees that such practice is essential. May all players find the technique and hardware that gives them joy, with more of the former than latter, so as to make up for when the latter (that stinking reed) isn’t up to snuff.

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