Author: Bob Phillips
Date: 2009-07-21 15:42
Well, not a bushel, exactly, but 3 loosely packed plastic shopping bags of barrels.
A colleague announced that his friend had just gone into the clarinet barrel business, and had made him a custom barrel to curs his intonation challenges using an odd, long mouthpiece on his Buffet R13.
The fellow, Doug Bendewald, has been making rather larger wood turnings (like colonial columns!) for many years and has now developed tooling for clarinet barrels. His web site:
http://vesselsclarinetbarrels.com/www.vesselsclarinetbarrels.com.html
Another colleague, worried about playing a long gig with one of THOSE string quartets, ordered short barrels for his Selmer 9G Bb and Yamaha A clarinets so he could push his pitch up to 442+. Working with Dough, he stumbled upon an incredible barrel, fell in lust, bought it and brought it to WW5 last week. Switching to bassoon for the evening, he loaned me that special barrel.
AND I FELL INTO LUST, trying to foist my cocobollo spare barrel on him. SIGH. it has rings, and he noticed.
Now, the good part:
I've been keeping an eye out for one of these miracle barrels and auditioned several dozen to match my Buffet RC. I emailed Doug, and told him that I wanted to find Miracle Barrel's kid sister.
Yesterday, he brought a bushel of barrels (about 45 of them) to a local church, and two of us took over the main rooms in the building and went through them. I didn't find that miracle barrel, but did find two of her kid sisters, bought them and took them home with me.
A ringless cocobollo barrel dramatically improved my setup. It made a huge difference in my expressivity --allowing subtleties in leaps and fast passages not possible with my stock barrel (from another Buffet) that has been my best barrel so far. It also greatly increased my dynamic range, from ppp to fff (but not ffff). I have yet to sit down and check its 12ths and intonation.
A second barrel of Bocote, is very similar in playing characteristics, but quite a bit less boisterous.
Some observations:
1.) These barrels were made from adjacent sections of wooden blanks on production tooling. No customization (taper, wall thickness, wood selection...) was applied.
2.) They were very consistent in their playing characteristics.
3.) It seems that we were searching for the variability between the individual barrels. Of the 45 or so I tried, three didn't work with my setup at all, and 5 felt and sounded (to me, the player) considerably better than anything in my small collection of barrels.
4.) For barrels like these: using off-the-rack lumber and production tooling, it remains a challenge to find the one or 3 of 45 that will really make a difference to YOUR playing.
5.) Sampling 3 at a time would be very inefficient search procedure. Go to the bushel basket, and spend hours. What seemed to work was to line up the candidates, trying to find one that was noticeably different. Compare that out-of-the-ordinary barrel to your own (baseline) barrel. Reject ruthlessly to thin the candidates.
6.) The miracle barrel is still not in my possession, but I'm better off than I was.
NOW: the scheme.
I'm applying a little strip of blue masking tape to my barrel for WW5 tonight --so that I can increase the confusion between my "kid-sister" barrel and the Miracle Barrel in the hopes that I can spirit it home in my case. SIGH
Bob Phillips
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The Clarinet BBoard
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