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 tone for Low Eb on Bass Clarinet
Author: Justin 
Date:   2001-11-27 22:31

Any known way to improve the tone for this note?

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 RE: tone for Low Eb on Bass Clarinet
Author: Bob Arney 
Date:   2001-11-28 00:10

Justin, can you take some of the "guessing game" aspect out of this. How about tightening up the question. Is your Bass in registration? Do you have any leaks? What strength reed do you use? Mouthpiece? Ligature? Finally, who made your Bass and when? With all this the "doctors" may be better equipped to give you a serious response. My own instant immediate thought would be a minor mis-regulation problem producing a leak with subsequent loss of tone quality.
Bob A

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 RE: tone for Low Eb on Bass Clarinet
Author: David Spiegelthal 
Date:   2001-11-28 15:29

It's very often an uncharacteristic-sounding note on many brands of (low-Eb) bass clarinets, and while I've done a lot or experimenting, I've personally had little success in improving this note other than by replacing the entire bell (after trying a number of bells to see what works the best for a particular instrument). Fortunately, this note rarely appears in situations where great tone quality is an absolutely necessity (purists, pardon me for saying that).

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 RE: tone for Low Eb on Bass Clarinet
Author: beth 
Date:   2001-11-28 18:50

I doubt this'll help, but you never know - I recently learned an alternative fingering for the low-Eb for a piece of music where I had to play several measures of low-Eb to low-Ab eighth notes at about 126 bmp. To me, the alternatively fingered note sound a wee bit better - maybe because I like doing things differently, and using one's foot to play the bass certainly falls into that category!

Well, here's how I do the alternate low-Eb: finger your low E the normal way and now take your left foot and use it to pop open that lowest key on the left (the big round one on the bell). Do all that at the same time will give you low-Eb. Now to easily play the low-Ab from that low-Eb, all you have to do is to finger and foot that alt. low-Eb and press the #4 key, the Ab/G# key, as usual.

I hope my explaination is clearer than mud and that may be usefull for someone else. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "flat-foot".

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 RE: tone for Low Eb on Bass Clarinet
Author: LynnL 
Date:   2001-11-28 20:03


Justin,

This may not be a lot of help, because not everyone can afford a fix like this, but here goes. I have a Leblanc 430S professional level low C bass on which I had resonators installed. These devices were installed on the lower joint and the #C key on the upper joint. The result is that those low notes and the others too coming booming out. Pete Grennier wrote an article in The Clarinet about 10 yrs. ago, which explains the acoustic theory behind what he does.Now it's expensive because you must repad the instrument to do it.

Lynn

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