 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Joanne
Date: 1999-06-09 14:37
Can anybody tell me about undercut tone holes? How is it done and what difference does it make to the sound/intonation?
Thanks
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Author: paul
Date: 1999-06-10 21:17
I might not get it totally technically correct, but I'll take a stab at explaining it...
Undercut tone holes are supposed to help make the produced tone sound better coming from the clarinet. There are lots of technical explanations why, including letting the air stream flow by and through the tone holes a lot smoother than with straight tone holes. I believe the concept of turbulence (lots of side currents and eddies, etc.) is involoved with it, too. At the factory (i.e. "Don't try to do this at home!!"), the techs take a strawberry shaped Dremel tool and round off the edges of each tone hole from the inside out, so the air that you blow into the horn flows through the bore and then to the outside through the rounded tone holes. This process is time consuming and takes a lot of expertise. You will ruin your clarinet if you attempt to do it on your own. If you hear or see the word "fraising", this is the same thing as rounding off the tone holes, since the word comes from the French word for strawberry.
One of the best ways to compare for yourself the difference between undercut tone holes and straight tone holes is to compare to like clarinets, but one with undercut holes and one without them. I did this comparison with a Buffet E-11 intermediate grade clarinet and a Yamaha YCL-52 intermediate grade clarinet a few years back. It was a good head-to-head comparison of very similar horns. For me, the Buffet had more resistance and it was a little more finicky about fingerings than the Yamaha. The tone produced from the Buffet horn sounded better. Now, as I understand it, Yamaha is undercutting the tone holes in their intermediate horns nowadays, so you might not be able to hear for yourself the difference in tone quality. However, generally speaking, a clarinet with undercut tone holes will produce a higher quality sound for each note, compared to a straight tone hole clarinet. There will be exceptions, of course.
The only way I can explain the difference is to tell you that I can make professional musicians turn their heads and listen to my warm-up, firmly believing that I am a professional clarinetist. The tone produced from my undercut clarinet is that good. That kind of reaction never happened with my straight tone hole clarinet. However, I have to be fair and tell you that my undercut clarinet is a premium pro-grade horn that can make even an adult novice like me sound great. The straight tone hole clarinet that I had was an intermediate grade horn.
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Author: Drew
Date: 1999-06-10 23:30
How can you visaully determine if a clarinet has undercut tone holes? Do you need an inspection mirror that will fit into the bore so you can look at the tone holes from the inside? And how to those clarinet elves get that dremel tool bit into the bore in the first place? Must be some sort of clarinet magic going on.....
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Author: Joris van den Berg
Date: 1999-06-11 01:30
nope, any mechanical engineer could tell you there are standard machinery tools in the shape of
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which if you put them into a hole of the size
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(which would fit perfectly)
and turn them round
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will produce less sharp edges of the hole, which will make the air stream make less turbulent, but more instable. (tone sounds better and responds better=is more voulnerable to inacurate fingering)
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Author: paul
Date: 1999-06-11 13:56
Since some of the tone holes require just a little bit of "adjustment", it may be very difficult to see for yourself the effect of the work. Like I said before, the only way I could tell the difference was to test play clarinets in the same class, but with undercutting as the only major difference between them. Just like Mr. van den Berg said above, you will find the undercut horns sound better but with the trade off that they are more finicky about totally accurate fingerings. In order to have one feature, you must trade something off somewhere else. That's a fact of life in designs of almost anything you can imagine.
Also, as you would expect, the higher quality and higher grade horns are the only ones that will have this kind of detail near hand made work done on them. That's what drives up the cost and the price of the horn. It's not the starting materials ($20 or so of wood, even for the very best horn). It's not necessarily the basic keywork (silver plate is exactly that - it's electroplated in place). Rather, it's the detailed workmanship in undercutting, intonation adjustments, and other very technical items that take years to learn and master especially for factory technicians. What you are really paying for is a lot of labor-hours of work on the horn, with each factory tech getting paid a good salary to concentrate on making excellent clarinets as a full time career.
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Author: Don Berger
Date: 1999-06-11 19:17
My compliments to all above for an excellent discussion-description of a very important, delicate, improvement to the straight-bored [simple-minded] inexpensive clarinet so as to make a truly "professional" instrument well worth the additional cost! Don
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Author: Don Berger
Date: 1999-06-11 20:37
I recalled that Rendall in "The Clarinet" [1954 revised 1971] had quite a bit to say in Chap.V about bore and tone holes so for those wishing to pursue the subject, I hope your local library has it as ours does "right here in River City" [apologies to Music Man] !! Don
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