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Re: Conn Bass Clarinet serial numbers

Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017
Date: 2015-12-16 19:18

The prewar Conns were mostly professional-level double register vent instruments and played pretty well, but generally had a range only to low E.

The WWII and just-postwar Conns were a decent bespoke design and
sometimes even went to low D.

From sometime in the late 50s or early 60s maybe (I'm not sure at all about the dates) Conn stopped making their own instruments and simply rebranded wood and hard-rubber models made by Robert Malerne in Paris.

Unfortunately these are inferior designs with single register vents. They have a good sound in the bottom "money" register and throat tones but play very sharp in the low and high clarion registers. I've overhauled and modified/improved over a dozen of these and never been able to get them to play at an advanced or professional level. I have a hard-rubber Malerne for sale right now, in fact, which I've just overhauled and used every trick I know to improve it, and it's still at best an intermediate instrument.

A significant problem with every Malerne-made bass or alto clarinet is the keywork: They used a lousy alloy of cupronickel (a.k.a. nickel-silver or German silver) which is soft and tarnishes instantly to sort of a yellowish tinge. Plus the rods are thin, as are the screws that hold them, and the screws have a bad habit of rusting inside the posts or rods. They are comfortable instruments and reliable if handled with kid gloves, but fragile (a very bad characteristic for an instrument marketed to students!).

I would avoid the later Malerne-made Conns. You can recognize them instantly by the shape of the r.h. side trill key touchpieces, they are rectangular with slightly rounded edges. The register mechanism is also easily identifiable.

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