Author: Jarmo Hyvakko
Date: 2018-03-04 12:52
It's interesting to follow the use of adjectives to describe the sound of a clarinet. What is dull to someone is dark, covered, mysterious to others and on the other side, i heard a string player colleaque once describe a sound that in my opinion was an excellent example of a bright, resonant and lively sound, a "mouth-harmonica-sound"!
About the rails, i wrote only about the tip rail. It's completely true, that those who favor ehm... dark and mysterious sound tend to prefer wider rails. I also believe that these people also tend to prefer the feeling that whenever they want something more resonant, they want to deliberately act to achieve it, someone might say force it out of the instrument. And to that playerpersonality it can be quite uncomfortable to play a reed/mouthpiece combination, where they sort of have to avoid certain sound qualities.
The tip rail is different, you can adjust the width of it. The effective width of the rail is from the bottom edge of the rail to the top end of the reed. When you lower the reed on the table, the reed plays more resonant and feels slightly softer as long as it doesn't start to leak from the top corners. If the tip rail is thin, like in older vandoren mouthpieces, under 1mm, you have no room for adjustment.
Jarmo Hyvakko, Principal Clarinet, Tampere Philharmonic, Finland
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The Clarinet BBoard
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