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RE: "Condensation"

Author: Don Poulsen
Date: 2001-04-13 13:37

Your breath contains a lot of moisture, a lot of which condenses on the cooler inside surface of your instrument.

Take my bass clarinet, for instance. After playing it a while, there is moisture lining much of the upper joint. It could not be saliva because if any droplets left my mouth, they would not be able to fly up over the arch of the gooseneck - the air doesn't have that great of a velocity. Besides, most of us don't sputter into our instruments, we just blow air. So, even the moisture that collects in the gooseneck is almost entirely condensation.

And just because something is called a "spit valve" doesn't necessarily mean that what comes out of it is spit. Whoever first named it was making an assumption. And hey, the section of my instrument I call a gooseneck did not come from a goose and it really isn't a neck.

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