Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2019-03-13 21:02
Maruja wrote:
> The effect? A
> fuzziness, a lack of clarity. It doesn't matter much in band
> rehearsal but I have an exam coming up and I want the clarinet
> to sound its best.
>
I can't hear you play, so I have to guess at what the problem really is, but my knee-jerk reaction is that the moisture around the upper joints may not be the cause of your "fuzziness." Moisture building up on the back (the flat side) of your reed may be. It could be more pronounced if the reed isn't sitting flat against at least the upper end of the mouthpiece table (just under the window) so that water runs into any opening there.
Are you by any chance using synthetic reeds? I ask because they seem (at least in my experience) to send water running down into the mouthpiece and then the rest of the clarinet much more quickly and in greater amounts than cane.
Neither of those explains why you find that the fuzziness goes away after you swab and wipe the sockets out. Moisture buildup in those areas comes with playing a woodwind, and there is really no way to avoid it. Frequent swabbing may help keep the water from running farther down the bore and filling tone holes. So, at best you may just have to deal with frequent swabbing.
One other possibility, I suppose, is that your tenons are shorter than the sockets they go into by enough that there's a larger than usual empty space between the tenon end and the socket bottom. If that's the case, maybe accumulated water in that space starts vibrating. I've never experienced it, but I guess it could happen in theory.
Karl
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