 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: JMcAulay
Date: 2002-09-11 20:13
Some of you are probably tired of seeing may rants about Clarinet bells, and why I think they are unnecessary. The bell was not seen on the Chalumeau, at least according to all drawings I've been able to find. And I have been absolutely unable to unearth any evidence of a genuine antique Chalumeau -- that is, one which was built prior to Denner's first Clarinet. I almost tend to agree with Eoin McAulay's opinion that the Chalumeau *might* actually never have existed. It seems plausible to me that the bell was a marketing ploy by Denner. "Gee, Maude, looky here! This thing not only sounds kinda like a trumpet, it even has a bell." And nowadays, lots of players and designers wonder what to do about the different sound quality of the "bell tones." Hence, many very high-quality Clarinets are built with bells that have holes drilled through them, so the adverse effec of the bell will be reduced. But why have a bell, and then keep it from doing anything useful? I suggest getting rid of the bell-shaped bottom of the instrument entirely. I have not consulted all available books on acoustics to see if anyone has a better idea of what the bell is supposed to do. which may be a good thing. If I had, maybe I'd have been dissuaded from trying something this crazy. So, in case anyone cares...
My first trials in straight-bottoming a Clarinet have been done. Results certainly are not definitive, since things here are a bit coarse. The new bottom piece was made from ABS pipe (schedule 200) with an inner diameter greater than the right joint's bore at the bell tenon (so the new piece to be attached and sealed with tape). The Clarinet used is my Vito V-40. Curiously, and contrary to my expectation, the length of the pipe segment "wants to be" about the same length as the original bell. On the third try, the piece was made 107 mm long, which seems about right for decent intonation. This need for the piece to be longer than expected may be because the pipe is a bit larger than a perhaps ideal inner diameter, but the definitive answer will require more empirical work and analysis. It looks strange, the black Clarinet with a straight white bottom end. But it sounds fine, with hardly a trace of raucous "bell sound." Slurring from low F down to E or C5 down to B sounds very much as if it had been done on a full Boehm Clarinet with another tone hole down below, not just a flared-out bell. There's a lot more that needs to be done. Once things get further along, it would be nice to play it into a good spectrum analyzer to see what the overtone differences really are when comparing this bottom with an ordinary bell.
Try it yourself. For two dollars worth of plastic pipe (enough for 25 or 30 Clarinets), along with a hacksaw for cutting and a Swiss Army Knife for deburring, it's certainly not a major project. But do be careful applying tape to a wood Clarinet, as it might be hard to remove.
Regards,
John
onward and downward
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Author: Synonymous Botch
Date: 2002-09-11 22:46
And we would want to do this for what reason?
Perhaps a read of Benade is in order....
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Author: ron b
Date: 2002-09-11 22:57
John -
From my personal observations:
If the tube were not flared it would need to be much longer to sound the lower notes C#/F#, C/F, E/B. This would necessitate the mechanism for the lowest holes being longer, not an insurmountable problem (look at saxes, bassoons and such). The larger problem arises with the lower joint open finger holes; they would have to be much more widely spaced. Now you have to either angle them like bassoons or cover them with padded cups. So, things get more complicated - and expensive :|
The compromise, one of many, is to gradually increase the bore diameter to raise the pitch so the holes can be closer together.
A possibly unforseen benefit is that the instrument will also fit into a smaller case.
The clarinet seems to have developed, with or without Denner, from an ongoing search for comfort, compromise and convenience.
Oops, I forgot to mention... a lovely sound
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Author: Bob
Date: 2002-09-11 23:11
JMc: I applaud your research...really...but can't help but think that the bell was put there so the horn could be "stood up" without falling over.
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Author: diz
Date: 2002-09-12 02:14
Hey McAuley
I've got a problem with the pipe in my kitchen - can you help please?
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Author: JMcAulay
Date: 2002-09-12 19:31
Thanks for the comments, both here on the BB and by email. Some Clarinetists apparently believe the bell on the nstrument must serve some useful purpose, but none has yet offered a convincing account of just what that might be. I would be pleased to have someone offer a cogent explanation of why my concepr is valueless, so that I might stop this nonsense and devote more time to Clarinet playing. Perhaps doing a small experiment will convince anyone that the bell is not necessary. If you have a Clarinet with low E-flat and a Clarinet without it, you can do something which will give you an idea of what this is all about. And you will see that it really isn't difficult at all. Assemble the two instruments, but do not use the bell on the one with the low Eb key. Then play a low E on both instruments. You should be able to observe that the lpw E sounds very similar from both instruments, although the one with no bell will probably have a "smoother" sounding tone; it may be also very slightly sharp. Then compare the lengths of the two instruments as they are, The one without the bell is considerably shorter, and the addition of a short tube to bring it down to proper pitch would not make it as long as the instrument with the bell. This experiment can also be tried with an A Clarinet and a Bb Clarinet by removing the bell from the A Clarinet and playing the written F on that instrument.
SB: First, in my initial posting, please reread the leading paragraph re "bell tones." Also, the instrument without a bell would be shorter, lighter, and less expensive to produce. The bell requires a much larger diameter piece of wood than the rest of the instrument. Especially in Blackwood, such a piece is much more rare and costly. Also, turning the bell likely produces more kerf than comes from the entire rest of the instrument.
Reading Bonade is always a nice idea. I especially like (and use) his ligatures.
ron_b: You seem to be thinking in reverse gear. To produce a given pitch, the instrument with a larger bore must be *longer*, not shorter. The old "Albert" Clarinets favored by many New Orleans Jazz players had larger bores than other instruments of their day and were, consequently, longer. The longest Bb Clarinet I ever measured was 27 inches in length, an old Boosey & Hawkes "Albert." It was considerably longer than the A. Fontaine/Couesnon "Boehm" that measures out at barely more than 25 inches. Some recorders (especially larger ones) have a reverse conical bore with a smaller diameter near the foot than near the fipple. I have a recorder with an overall length of 645 mm. The bore going into the main joint is lust over 24.5 mm, the bore at the bottom of the foot joint is about 17 mm. This change in bore diameter allows the lower tone holes to have almost identical spacing with the upper tone holes. If the bore were a constant 24.5 mm throughout, the lower tone holes could all be covered only by a player with a remarkably large right-hand finger spread. The holes are also drilled at various angles, which helps to achieve evenness of hole spacing..
Your other comments are well-taken. I agree that Clarinet development did not stop hundreds of years ago. Acousticians and Clarinet designers of a hundred years back might well have laughed at the idea of a "polycylindrical bore." The first application of this design in the 1950s led to an amazing number of instrument sales and the creation of an informal fraternity of Buffet players, many of whom are willing to let anyone know at great length the virtues of the R-13 design. (Should they ever become organized, perhaps they might call themselves "The Polycylindrical Bores.")
Bob: Thank you for your appreciation. And you are quite correct: the instrument really does not stand up well on that small pipe. Sort of like trying to stand a flute on end. This could be rectified by screwing a tripod onto the instrument, but that would create a new caution fin ensemble play: avoiding poking out an eye of your adjacent instrumerntalist.
diz: Surely. Of course, my usual fee for field engineering work would apply: US$350/day plus all expenses, with Business Class as a minimum on any flight over four hours. I eagerly await receipt of your US$3,000 deposit. PayPal is quite okay. I could be on the next plane.
Finally, it is true that the design of a Clarinet is a maze of compromises In fact, the Clarinet offers the greatest number of acoustical design challenges of any commonly-encountered musical instrument. The bell, however, is not a solution to any of these problems. I suggest that it is, instead and indeed, the cause of some of them.
Regards,
John
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Author: Ken Shaw
Date: 2002-09-12 20:23
John -
A small correction. All surviving baroque recorders have a reverse conical bore, as do reproductions and modern designs. The surviving renaissance recorders have cylindrical or slightly reverse conical bores with a bit of flare at the bottom. Medieval recorders are hypothetical reconstructions from paintings and have cylindrical bores.
Boxwood, which was used for most old recorders, warps severely and irregularly. The bores end up curved and oval, so measurements are very difficult, though for gross differences, such as conical vs. cylindrical, it's easy to tell the difference.
Up through Boehm's time, flutes also had reverse conical bores, and Boehm made wood-bodied reverse conical flutes with his mechanism. Almost all professional quality wood piccolos are reverse conical even today.
Best regards.
Ken Shaw
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Author: JMcAulay
Date: 2002-09-12 20:56
Ken, thank you for that correction. Surely enough, the one I mentioned in the earlier post is a fairly recent German-made "Barock"-fingering instrument (with modern exterior design). Thank you for having read the post so carefully. Elliptical I'm not, you may have noticed.
For measuring an irregular bore, a solution might be to use a dimethyl siloxane based material to make an impression of the interior. Then pull it out (a proper material will not adhere to the wood) and measure it. Do you know if anyone has done that?
Regards,
John
who likes recorders, owns recorders, and plays recorders but obviously is not a great authority on recorders
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2002-09-12 21:19
JMcAulay wrote:
> Reading Bonade is always a nice idea. I especially like (and
> use) his ligatures.
Art Benade was a world renowned nuclear physicist at Case Western Reserve University, whose specialty was acoustics. Along with being an accomplished flutist, he wrote the seminal tomes on musical acoustics: Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics and Horns, Strings, and Harmony (in his spare time, no less). He died in
Daniel Bonade, a student of Lefevbre and Rose, was a distinguished clarinetist and pedagogue. He taught at Curtis Institute of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and the Juilliard School of Music. His students included some of the finest in America, such as Robert McGinnis, Robert Marcellus, Mitchell Lurie, Ignatius Gennusa, Anthony Gigliotti, and Bernard Portnoy.
Their names are often confused. I believe Benade is the reading suggestion for the ideas and formulae for the bell.
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Author: David Spiegelthal
Date: 2002-09-12 21:38
I recently bought (er, that is "won at auction") on eBay a very interesting Horst Moennig bass clarinet (that I could ill afford to buy, unfortunately) -- one of its most interesting features is that, although it's a low-Eb instrument the body is nearly as long as that of a typical low-C bass, because not only is the low-Eb tonehole on the body instead of the bell, there is also an additional resonance hole below the low-Eb, THEN followed by a very long bell (a la Selmer rosewood contra) with no tonehole on it. In other words, for all intents and purposes it is nearly a 'straight-bottomed clarinet" as the bell is sufficiently far from the lowest "operating" tonehole that it's essentially just there for decoration. The instrument plays reasonably well, and the only distinguishing feature playing-wise that I've been able to detect in the very short time since I completed overhauling the horn, is that the low Eb seems to have a timbre more similar to that of the notes above it, than is usual. But I'm not sure it's worth the additional length and weight. To get to the point, I think that JM's question and research do have some merit --- but tradition is hard to buck!
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Author: Bob Arney
Date: 2002-09-12 21:47
Dave, would you have any thoughts on extending what is there (adding keywork etc) toward making Low C instrument?
Bob A
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Author: Bob Arney
Date: 2002-09-12 21:48
Dave, would you have any thoughts on extending what is there (adding keywork etc) toward making your own Low C instrument?
Bob A
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Author: Ken Shaw
Date: 2002-09-12 21:49
David -
I just got my September issue of The Clarinet. On p. 41, there's a great picture of Dennis Smylie holding a bass clarinet with a gigantic metal bell with, I think, a low C extension. Does your new toy look anything like it?
Ken Shaw
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Author: Robert
Date: 2002-09-13 11:46
Stephen Fox (Canadian clarinet maker) writes about basic clarinet acoustics in the following article:
http://www.sfoxclarinets.com/baclac_art.htm
"Consider a clarinet (Boehm system) with a completely cylindrical bore of, say, 15.0mm diameter, right from the top of the mouthpiece bore down to the bottom end. When playing such an instrument, the first observation is that tone projection is uneven; overall it is rather muffled, but the notes sounded with the full length of the clarinet (bottom E and middle B) are much stronger. This leads to the first modification of the bore, the addition of a bell. The bell acts as an efficient radiator of sound into the room, particularly the high frequencies; and since the bell acoustically approximates a length of tubing with a row of open tone holes, the tone of the bell notes now matches that of the rest of the scale."
I play Buffet Festival clarinets, and don't find any problem with the sound of the bell tones. I also play on a Buffet Prestige basset clarinet, which extends to low C. The bell tones are a little softer than those of a "normal" A clarinet, but I wouldn't say there was a marked improvement with this longer right-hand joint.
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Author: David Spiegelthal
Date: 2002-09-13 14:17
Bob Arney Bob Arney (from the Department of Redundancy Department),
I intend to make a low-C extension for my hard-rubber Kohlert bass clarinet one of these days, should I ever get some "free time" (yeah, right!). I'm going to leave the Moennig alone in that respect, for reasons both technical and historical.
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Author: Don Berger
Date: 2002-09-13 23:18
VELLY INTERESTING, y'all. I read A Benade's "make yer own cl" many years ago [and recently] and concluded that folks "working for a living" would out-perform my feeble efforts. Looking among oldie-pics/descriptions for chalemeaus as differentiated from cls, it seemed to me that it was the "speaker/register" key [concept/employment] rather than the bell which defined the diff. As far as I know, we still dont have the complete mathematical/calculus methods of cl design, so much is still experimental [cut and try!], leading to a variety of solutions evaluated in the marketplace. Robert's/Fox's discussion makes good sense to me. Dave, I'll be happy to try out your "Low C [or D]" extension/keying on my Linton/Malerne, or Selmer any time. Don
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Author: Just me
Date: 2002-09-15 02:19
How stupid does this get. I'm sure the clarinet manufactures build and design bells on their clarinets because they make bigger bucks from selling clarinets with bells than with pipes. Besides, bell bottom clarinets are just the fad these days, and every other day. Get a life. Just me
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Author: Robert
Date: 2002-09-15 12:23
Just me-
That's got to be one of the most stupid comments I've seen on the BB. You can't really think that 300 years of clarinet makers have been making clarinets with a bell because "they make bigger bucks from selling clarinets with bells than with pipes"??! It's through the experiments of people like John McAulay that instruments improve, and it's definitely worth considering, discussing and experimenting with such an important aspect of clarient design.
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Author: JMcAulay
Date: 2002-09-16 02:38
Just_me: heheheheh... It appears that you have a faulty conception of the manufacturing business. If any manufacturer can reduce the cost of an item by twenty dollars (making it more profitable) while reducing the selling price of an item by ten dollars (making a purchase more attractive to cosumers), selling a hundred thousand of those items will increase the supplier's profits by one million dollars. Does that sound at all interesting? If it does, you now know one of the reasons people go to graduate schools to get MBAs. It's so they will understand such things.
And thank you, Robert, for the kind words.
Well, it may not be the sort of life anyone else would enjoy, but it's fine with me. I get a real kick out of exploiting principles previously ignored, and all that sort of stuff. Especially when, as I have seen happen several times in the past, technologies have been based on conclusions that were unfounded, unsupported by empirical data, or just accidentally originated. I have ceased being amazed to see such as: "Thus it is found that..." whereupon the so-called experimenter spouts forth his own preconceived notion which cannot be drawn from reported observations.
A friend, Phineas J. Icenbice Jr. (really), once worked for Collibns Radio Company. He was asked by Art Collins to prepare an RF filter with certain characteristics. In looking for a housing, he went to their metal storeroom and asked the clerk for something that woule be of a certain general size, and the clerk offered him a piece of cylindrical aluminum tubing. Phineas said he thought that would do just fine. He built the item, it did work fine, and several other suppliers began cranking out "clones" of the Collins filter -- built, of course, in cylindrical aluminum housings. So, this design was perpetuated primarily because one item was handy to the Collins Radio storeroom clerk. And there are many more such stories. Perhaps the worst possible reason to keep doing something is because "it's always been done this way."
And yes, Denner's greatest contribution was the Clarinet's register key, but he also appears to have added the flared bell to the Chalumeau -- presuming there really was such an instrument. The need for a register key is obvious: it makes the instrument a lot easier to play over a greater compass. But what does the bell do that can't be done without? I'm still not sure.
Steve Fox has great skills around our favorite instruments. He plays them well, understands them well, and builds them well. Perhaps he would not object to a quote of the final sentence from his recent email to me, following which he was assured that I do not succumb to suggestions from people who have more objections than ideas: "Good luck with the experimenting, and don't let the naysayers on the bulletin board get you down."
Regards,
John
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Author: d dow
Date: 2002-09-16 04:01
Just like a plane is a plane becuase it has wings a bell makes the clarinet a clarinet. The philosohpy of the bell can be read on somewhat in ;
Geoffrey Rendall, "The Clarinet". London 1952.
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Author: JMcAulay
Date: 2002-09-16 04:57
david: Thanks for posting. I find Rendall's comments on Clarinet bells lacking. For example, Rendall speaks of a bell as an "essential part of the instrument's acoustical system," which is to me but a platitude. After all, so is the design of the pads, but many alternative designs work well. He also says "Experiments have shown that it is important acoustically," but he presents no information regarding those experiments relative to the optimum shape of the acoustically important bell. Most bells are flared, some are conical, I'm trying to determine if a straight foot could do as well, and for all we know one shaped like a piggy bank would work best of all. No one knows for certain. And for an even more bizarre question, why does the bell on a Clarinette d'Amoré look like an onion, rather like that of a Cor Anglais? I'm looking for any available empirical data regarding bells, but there seems to be more arm-waving than data on this subject.
Regards,
John
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