Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2014-08-14 20:21
Ruben wrote:
>> Tony Pay: Maybe a new speaker key could be devised that would mechanically lend itself to "modulating". If you have any ideas, we're game!>>
...and Paul Aviles wrote:
>> A friend of mine pointed out to me that Stephan Fox makes a 'the Benade system' clarinet that does just that.>>
Not really. What that clarinet does is to have the LH thumb key perform two separate actions, according to whether or not the throat A key is pressed. That means that the 'register key' part of the LH thumb key action can control a much smaller hole.
What I was talking about was making the hole effectively smaller by reducing the clearance; and it's true that a modern register key, because of its shape and placement, doesn't facilitate precise control of the clearance. It's more an ON/OFF key.
Whereas, the period instrument gives you access to the END of the key, so you can 'clamp' the key in one position and still have freedom of movement of your other LH fingers.
I suppose that if I wanted, I could put a blob of Araldite on the end of my (modern) register key, after having shortened it, so that it was more like a period instrument. But I think to design a commercial instrument like that would be building in a feature too sophisticated for the general user.
It's interesting to me that, yet again, the idea of opposing forces comes up when we want precise control. Here, those opposing forces are frictional; the key 'pushed at the end' doesn't open or close because of friction between your thumb and the end of the key. (Like the 'wrench', as opposed to the 'pliers', for those who remember my post about that:
http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=326083&t=326083)
I want to say something else, about the bit of Fox's website you quoted where he says:Quote:
Another requirement for the register hole is that the tube should project as little as possible into the bore, so as to avoid turbulence... Though what I said to Ken Shaw about turbulence still stands, I think that the quote is misleading.
It's not obvious to me that the extent to which the tube projects into the bore should have an effect on the turbulence produced by the oscillatory airflow. Benade speaks about the sharpness of edges creating turbulence; but not about that, as far as I can see.
I'm not surprised that Ken was misled.
Tony
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The Clarinet BBoard
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