 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Wayne R.
Date: 2002-10-20 17:00
Hi again everyone,
Just a quick mouthpiece story from my recent return-to-playing after 25 plus year vacation from the clarinet. I played back when on a Selmer student model mouthpiece, and thought it just fine, and as earlier mentioned it took me well into college. Feeling that now I could certainly afford to at least try a few higher quality mouthpieces, I assembled a small squadron of various suspects from current popular names like Selmer, Woodwind and Vandoren and proceeded to play them all, trying to randomly play each one not knowing which was which. Having earlier performed on a medium-open piece, I was completely floored to discover that the piece I finally selected from the lot (running the complete gamut from closed to open facings) was the most closed of all...a Selmer HS*! Moral of the story to all on the age-old mouthpiece hunt...try everything you can get your hands on without prejudice! You may very well be as suprised as I at what you end up taking home. (Maybe that M1513 is worth looking into after all!)
Wayne R.
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Author: Sylvain
Date: 2002-10-20 18:03
> (Maybe that M1513 is worth looking into after all!)
Definitely....
-S
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Author: donald nicholls
Date: 2002-10-20 20:39
my experience is that while it is possible to make generalisations re tip openings, in the end variations in the mouthpiece blank have such a huge impact on playing characteristics that an identical facing will have vastly different results on different blanks.
(This is common knowledge for some of you, i know)
i have seen the same reed being used with good result on both a very open mouthpiece (around 1.20mm) and on a close mouthpiece (say 1.04)... presumably factors in the thickness of the rails, bore, baffle, (table concavity?) etc conspired to make this possible. This is, of course, not always the case.
donald
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Author: Aussie Nick
Date: 2002-10-20 23:30
When you were trying the closed mouthpieces (even though you didn't know which was which) did you have to put a harder reed on them? For the moment I'm happy with my mouthpiece, and I'm too scared to go trying all the facings because I don't want to have to buy boxes of about 3 different reed strengths and get confused by putting different reeds on different mouthpieces.
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Author: Wayne R.
Date: 2002-10-21 01:52
I must confess that I used the same #3 Mitchell Lurie Premium reed on all the mouthpieces I tried (I realize this indeed can cause reed-mouthpiece mismatches here and there that may have colored my evaluations to some degree). I simply wanted to narrow the field down with a reed I'm very familiar with, and then go about the reed matching process after that. Lazy, perhaps a bit, but I wanted to lower the number of variables for myself. I would still like to try a Vandoren M15, and because of the longer facing might be forced to use a stonger reed to give it a fair trial, but crazy or not I'de still try my old #3 first for fun!
Wayne
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