Author: NOLA Ken
Date: 2022-05-21 05:49
Dan,
I'm familiar with that article. For those modifications to be relevant to our two instruments, both previous owners would have had to had their setups modified to be similar to Pete's based on Dr. Harrison's very complex modifications. That seems a stretch given that we have no reason to believe either instrument has any connection to Pete, to anyone with a relationship to him, or to each other besides being the same model. Mine was shipped by someone in Ohio, and I bought it in December, 2016, the same month that the Harrison article was published.
If I'm understanding you correctly, a crystal mouthpiece modified in the fashion described, a similarly-adjusted very soft reed and certain embouchure characteristics could produce a flat tone, necessitating a shorter barrel. Is that a situation that occurs often enough among jazz clarinetists to warrant frequently cutting the barrels down?
One hypothesis is that in both cases previous owners just slipped in shortened barrels for the sale, keeping the originals. The question then becomes, what reason would two players have for cutting any Leblanc Bb barrel that short? And is it more than coicidence for two like instruments to show up with such similarly modified barrels?
I realize that I'm drifting into very vague territory here. To have two such similar instances show up just tickled our joint curiousity. I'm going to take some time to explore our instruments a bit more, but will come back to this later. I have four rehearsals and a gig this week to prepare for (not on the Pete Fountain).
Not (yet) being conversant in mouthpiece geometry, I'm not familiar with the "Brand 23 facing" you refer to. Can you explain?
- Ken
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The Clarinet BBoard
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