Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2015-04-15 16:53
To take off on another recent thread, what exactly does chocolatey mean in a clarinet tone?
If you're looking for something with a response similar to the M13L or M15, there are lots of custom makers' products to try. Walter Grabner advertises the tone of his CXZ_Gxx mouthpieces as "reminiscent of the taste and texture of rich, dark chocolate, or the smell of fresh roasted coffee brewing on a cold winter’s morning." All carping about the verbiage aside, they are excellent, colorful-sounding and responsive mouthpieces. Greg Smith, Richard Hawkins and several others AFAIK use the same Zinner blank and add their own touches and facing styles to produce mouthpieces that are comfortable to play and don't have the pitch issues some of us have with Vandorens. Other mouthpiece makers like Clark Fobes and Chris Hill, to name two whose mouthpieces I like very much, use proprietary blanks to achieve excellent results. I've never used a mouthpiece by Brad Behn, but they have a great reputation for workmanship and great playing qualities, although pricier than the others. All produce good sounding, responsive mouthpieces.
In my opinion (others' mileage may vary) any of these will give you a different feel and depth of sound from a Vandoren. But they are also more expensive than Vandoren because of the handwork and resulting time involved in producing them. On the other hand there are very successful players using Vandoren mouthpieces (though they may have had them tweaked). In the end there's no escaping a process of trial and error to choose among even a subset of the mouthpieces that are available. Your best bet at this stage might be to ask your teacher for advice and use that as a starting point.
Most of us are probably either still playing on the mouthpiece we bought as advanced students (probably on our teachers' advice) or we're playing on the umpteenth in a long succession of favorites that we've discovered as we've grown, our tastes and needs have changed, or we've just given in to the wanderlust to try new things.
Karl
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