 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Alex K.
Date: 2015-05-17 18:46
Hey guys-
Just wondering if there is a long enough barrel to tune a B-flat clarinet to an A clarinet. Is it possible?
-Alex
Post Edited (2015-05-17 18:58)
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2015-05-17 19:06
NO
If you look at an "A" clarinet, they are longer and have a narrower bore. The tone holes are also slightly more spaced out. The internal pitch of a "Bb" could never work in the way you describe.
.............Paul Aviles
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2015-05-17 19:29
Paul Aviles wrote:
> NO
As with most absolute answers I see here, it ain't quite so cut & dry.
A longer barrel would work - but only for a few notes where the hole spacing on the Bb clarinet allowed the notes to sound more or less in tune. The spacing of the lattice of holes for the different pitched clarinets is different for each one; compare, for instance, the spacing of the holes on a Bb clarinet to the spacing of the holes on an Eb. Same number of holes, same basic layout, wildly different spacing. But ...
Corps de rechange used to be available to allow one clarinet to accommodate multiple pitches. The upper section would be swapped out to adjust to a different pitch, and the long notes would have to be lipped up & down to compensate. The corps de rechange were more of a necessity when each country or region had wildly different pitch standards. The (more or less) uniformity of a pitch standard has made the corps de rechange pretty much obsolete.
Then there is the string down the bore trick, but the one time I tried it on my clarinet it was so stuffy as to be unplayable.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2015-05-17 20:18
Thank you for the clarification. I was not aware of "corps de rechange" before.
My experience is mainly new instruments. In that realm I have experienced the odd pitch standard difference between the clarinets made for the present German market pitched at A=445 vs. our pitch standard of A=440. With that, I thought I was able to successfully manage lowering a 445 standard Wurlitzer sufficiently to be used in here in the States. Of course that was some years ago and I may not have been as picky back then. Karl Leister sports two pairs of Wurlitzers (one for each pitch standard) to make that pitch difference work.
That said, it is a matter of tuning THE SAME PITCH to which we are referring above. Lowering a clarinet a full half step make that issue even more dramatic.
Let's just say, I wouldn't do it.
................Paul Aviles
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Author: Caroline Smale
Date: 2015-05-17 22:47
Having read the above posts I still think in this case that the absolute answer "No" is absolutely correct.
There is no way putting a longer barrel on a Bb will make it an A (or an even longer barrel turn ino into an alto in Eb etc etc.)
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