 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: sonicbang
Date: 2018-01-25 00:39
Last week I went to my usual music store for new mouthpiece patches and I saw several boxes of reeds with -50% price drop. I asked the stuff about it and they said there was a clearence of old Vandoren products. I looked into the box and I found 4 boxes of blue box 3.5 and 2 boxes of 4 reeds, also blue box. All of it were labeled with the great old 'Hand Select' sticker! Of course I purchased all of them at once...
I opened the first box of 3.5 and they are ALL great! Maybe two from ten is just OK, but the rest is outstanding. Beautiful, resonant material, even resistance, uniform cut...something which is not the case with current Vandoren pruducts. I'm aware that these reeds were made by selected material but still, this quality is just not seen today. I know that there is a debate about reed seasoning and aging of material, but this is another story. I have tried literally everyting available on the market, but nothing could match these.
It's just so sad that I only have 5 unopened boxes of these and once they gone, they gone.
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Author: Caroline Smale
Date: 2018-01-25 03:06
I don't think the label "hand selected" had any significance to their production, just that someone on the VD staff had selected them from existing stock, presumably on appearance of the cane, even look of the cut or fibres etc.
I had some of those years ago but didn't find them noticeably better than the regular stock.
However the sheer passage of time since these were originally manufactured may have helped improve the maturity hence quality of the cane.
I certainly find that when I open a new box of reeds first purchased 10 or 20 years ago I seem to get a much better average of useable reeds from those boxes than from a recent box.
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