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Re: Think your ligature matters?

Author: fskelley
Date: 2014-04-26 21:52

Wow, Russ- what a can of worms. Nice job passing on the details. And there just might be a player or 20 (including some who don't and will never know) for whom that ligature would really be the best $140 they ever spent. Such is the nature of clarinet play. Only the independently wealthy can afford to try everything, and I bet even they cannot afford the TIME to really evaluate.

Let me return for a moment to my 4/23 and 4/25 posts about how ANY CHANGE would often, for me, improve my play briefly, then the benefit would fade away no matter how religiously I adhered to the change.

This effect, whatever you want to call it, happened to me most memorably with ligature changes and with reed treatment changes, during my Legere-only days. Let me give you an example. I was in one of my funk periods where I had several Legere reeds that were playing passably at best, usable but far from ideal... plus a closetful (perhaps 15) of older ones that seemed beyond hope. I think that was also during the time I was struggling with stability in upper clarion... A5-B5 [A5]

. I read about the Bois ligature and since it wasn't terribly expensive, thought I'd give it a shot. Man oh man, it was WONDERFUL. I was all over all registers, stable and clean. Really, if I could have kept playing that way, I would have been off to the races performance wise. I even posted about my experence here on BBoard, and credited it to the Bois. (That post is still in the archives but I edited it later.) Then the good play faded, reed by reed. That is, on each reed the new ligature would play nicely for a while (30 min?), then the reed would return to previous unplayability. Once I'd done this with 4 or 5 reeds, I was back where I started. Really I was worse off, because the Bois is harder to use with slippery Legeres, they won't hold their position. So I put it away and was back to the old drawing board.

But, since I'd found that ligatures seemed to markedly affect play- I kept at it with many others... strings, Optimum, my own modifications, etc etc. And I would often hit on a temporary (how temp did vary) benefit. BUT IT ALWAYS FADED. I began to suspect (and now I think I'm convinced) that all that was happening was... My reeds were vibrating in a particular manner with my original setup. And they had all gotten "tired" of it, which degraded their play. Then I swapped ligatures. I think that caused a tiny shift in what portion of the reeds were being exercised for each note. And some of the previously unexercised portion was still "fresh", so to speak, and for a time the reed behaved as new. But since the bulk of the reed was still worn out, the fresh part could only help for a short time until it too was kaput.

Then I thought, OK I will alternate between 2 or 3 ligatures to keep reviving the reed. Chasing the wind, wasted me a whole lot of time and energy.

Later I began experimenting with hot water dips. Again I got brief revivals of super play. I found in the long term that a given reed would degrade in how much and how long a dip would help. And that's how I spent a year or 2 in a futile attempt to create a sustainable and affordable nice playing Legere routine. And who knows, maybe I was 1 experiment away from cracking it, but at some point you have to punt the ball.

Even if I'm correct with my "localized tired plastic" theory for the Legeres, I have no idea whether cane reeds do the same thing. Or other synthetics. I'm already almost 61, and even if I've got lots of playing time left, I'm not willing to spend much more of it on such issues.

And perhaps some of my experiences had nothing to do with the usual experimenter's bias (since they were actual changes to playability).

Stan in Orlando

EWI 4000S with modifications

Post Edited (2014-04-26 21:56)

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2014-04-23 05:31