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Re: Slightly soft reed - squeaks

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2012-11-23 03:10

If you're comfortable with a 5RV and a #3 reed, your best bet would be to just play on it. There's no inherent reason why a B46 should play "flat and wobbly." It's more open-tipped than a 5RV (even more if the 5RV is a Series 13 version), so they may not play well with the same reeds. Your best course would be to pick one or the other and just play.

A search for "the ideal mouthpiece for my R-13" is IMO pointless - half the clarinet world (more or less) has played on R-13s over the past 60 years using more mouthpieces than you could try in a lifetime with often wonderful results. A mouthpiece may have specific tendencies that one player likes and that others hate, but the quality of the result comes from what the player is doing before the air ever reaches the reed. A player needs first to be comfortable with the basics of producing a consistent sound. The subtleties of one mouthpiece's advantage over another mean little or nothing until the things that happen before the mouthpiece are secure.

To answer your specific question, I've never found that a reed that was 1/2 strength too soft caused uncontrollable squeaking. Too soft a reed has other bad effects on the sound and the quality of staccato, but squeaking caused by a reed comes from a distortion in the way the reed vibrates, which can happen at any strength. If this happened with one specific reed, it's more likely that there was something specifically wrong with *it* than that the squeaking was caused by the strength.

Karl

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