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Re: Yamaha YCL-250 is very sharp

Author: Chris P
Date: 2016-03-07 19:22

Most clarinets are designed to play on the slightly sharper side as it's much easier to flatten most notes than trying to sharpen them.

Even with 67mm barrels I have to pull out by 1-2mm to bring the pitch of my playing (on older Selmers) down to 440Hz if that's the tuning we have to adhere to if tuned percussion and keyboards (and string players) are involved.

It's not always easy to tune down to 440Hz when it's hot or even tune up to it when cold and clarinets suffer with being flat when cold more than most other instruments. So makers often make an allowance by having them built to whatever set pitch they use (could be 440Hz, 442Hz or 444Hz depending on your locale) with the barrel pulled out by around 1mm at a temperature of around 19-20°C.

Not clarinets, but you will normally see brass players' instruments with their tuning slides pulled out relative to their length and rarely ever all the way in. They can tune their instruments more evenly than us woodwind players, but it's pretty much on the same basis that their instruments are much easier to flatten by pulling the slides out than to try and sharpen them if they had been built with nowhere to go except by cutting sections off the tuning slides to bring them up to pitch.

Former oboe finisher
Howarth of London
1998 - 2010
The opinions I express are my own.

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Yamaha YCL-250 is very sharp new

jthole

2016-02-23 21:00