The Clarinet BBoard

The Clarinet BBoard The C4 standard

New Topic | Go to Top | Go to Topic | Search | Help/Rules | Smileys/Notes | Log In

Previous Message | Next Message

Ligatures, Clamps and Physics

Author: SecondTry
Date: 2023-07-03 18:14

I'll bet some of you have at some point tried to saw, say, a piece of thin plywood that wasn't clamped down, either adequately or at all.

The wood started to vibrate with the action of the saw, and the cutting action quickly became orders of magnitude less effective. As many of us realize, much of the saw's energy got transferred into the movement of the wood, that had it been held stationary, would have instead gone into more efficient cutting action.

It's with this basic principle of physics and vibrations that ligatures confuse me.

If the goal is to maximize the vibration of the tip of the reed from the energy of our expelled air--and maybe this is not the goal--wouldn't clamping down the thick end of the reed with as much of its surface clamped, and clamped as tightly as possible, prevent the maximum transfer of our wind energy from the vibrating tip into the base of the reed, preserving that energy for tip vibration and sound production?

And yet in my own personal anecdotal trials, I've found that while too inadequate securing of a reed will generate the suboptimal performance we'd all expect, that too much clamping of the base is no good either, and that some ligatures designed to grab less of the reed base's surface area work well, perhaps better than ligatures that grab considerable surface area of the reed's base-doing so very tightly.

Perhaps some of the energy of our air needs to reside in places other than tip? Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the optimal physics of clamping a reed for sound production.

What are your thoughts here?

TIA

Reply To Message | Avail. Forums | Flat View

Newer Topic | Older Topic

Topics