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Re: The Register Key and tuning compromises

Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2014-08-14 14:44

Wow, just looked at the Fox website and found this pretty quick:

"At least two mouthpieces were made by Benade for the NX, both of which (designated by him as KNX and LNX) are shown on the bore diagram. They have mostly cylindrical bores of around 15.2mm diameter, with an additional flare at the bottom end; thus they have a considerably larger bore volume than a "standard" mouthpiece. Why would a small bore clarinet need a large bore mouthpiece? Largely to compensate for the flattening of the altissimo register by the smaller register tube (see below); or, to put it the opposite way, the oversized register tube of the conventional clarinet requires a reduction in mouthpiece bore to bring the high notes down to acceptable pitch.

Register/throat Bb mechanism and trill keys

An optimally proportioned (i.e., smaller diameter than usual) register tube is used, in order to minimize sharpening of the top and bottom of the scale caused by the register hole. (An empirical formula relating the length and diameter of the register tube is given in Benade’s Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics.) This necessitates an automatic mechanism operating separate holes for the register function and throat Bb; improvement of the quality of the Bb is thus an additional bonus.

Another requirement for the register hole is that the tube should project as little as possible into the bore, so as to avoid turbulence and an unwanted local perturbation in bore size; this means that it should be located on the side or the top of the tube, as with German clarinets or older Albert and Boehm system designs.

The hole that was formerly the Bb trill key hole is used as the normal Bb hole, connected to the register key by a rocker arrangement (similar in principle to the octave key on certain saxophones); the selection of register or Bb hole is made by the position of the A and G# keys. The second trill key is used to open a new tone hole in the B natural position, in addition to the Bb hole; the top trill key (for C) also opens the B natural hole. This gives an improvement in some throat tone trills (similarly to the Mazzeo custom clarinet) at, however, the expense of an easy A-Bb trill."

A lot of interesting things to digest here.

.............Paul Aviles

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