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Re: Vintage (not old) buffet. Comments

Author: Gregory Smith ★2017
Date: 2006-05-22 18:20

CPW -

I'll do the best that I can since Guy Chadash and I worked together on the prototype Bb and finalized it before it was sent to be copied in France...not copied exactly mind you, but as close as possible with the French doing things their way. I do know something about the A too since I've talked about it's development while Guy oversaw things on visits to France. (The A came out after the Bb.)

The wood origin you would have to email Francois Kloc about. Of course the wood is aged approx. 5 years now as opposed to many times that amount back in the late 50's and 60's - the era that this instrument harkens back to.

The barrel on both the Bb and A have two included in the case - the standard cylindrical bore and their version of the Chadash bore which is an inverted taper styled design. They tried for a long time to imitate Guy's barrels but no matter, they do not play anywhere similarly.

This is due to something that I talked about in a previous thread, namely the "spirit" of the reamer. No two reamers are alike no matter how closely they are copied or reverse engineered. That is why Guy keeps control of the barrels by having France send him semi-finished barrels with a smaller "pilot" hole already drilled into them. He then reams each barrel with his own reamers and sends them back to Buffet France to be distributed worldwide.

The register vent was Guy's idea after contemplating older wraparound register vents the protruded in much the same way. Given the long history of Buffet A clarinets in particular having problems with sub tones or ghost tones, he thought that extending the register tube out from the body of the clarinet and therefore shortening the protrusion of the tube into the bore of the clarinet, the overall volume of the inside of the bore would be more, an ideal solution to the problem. The register key has a "crook" in it to accommodate the protruding register vent.

The C#-G# tube has been extended outward to clear up the slight stuffiness that came from too short of a tone hole. Now that note resonates in an equivalent fashion to the notes around it even though it vents from the side of the instrument.

The bore is the same size and dimensions of the approx. 150,000 series Buffets that America went nuts about back in the 60's and led the R13 to dominate the US market to this very day. It has been slightly modified over the years and the result is the modern R-13. Numbers for the cylinder measurements I don't have. Perhaps Francois would have that too.

Finally, the bell was lengthened by 1mm when I discovered that the long B was a bit sharp on the Bb. After sending me a bell 1mm longer, the problem was fixed and off it went to the factory for the technicians at Buffet France to contemplate how they were going to make it their own.

Gregory Smith

Post Edited (2006-05-22 18:24)

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