Author: Bob Phillips
Date: 2013-01-26 15:02
Think of everything that together makes a clarinet: the wood, the machining, tone hole, location, size, undercut, the mechanism as random drawn from a "bell curve."
The bell curve should be:
Centered at exactly the right place , and
Narrow enough so that EVERY piece made is "good enough."
That way, the finished product is "good" right off the end of the assembly line.
I don't think that many instrument makers have the production systems that make this "Six-Sigma" process work, and that the resulting hodge-podge assembly of random pieces, and holes can be expected to produce a fine clarinet. I think that your Add $500 to the purchase price of a Buffet pays for correcting some of the things that are "out of tolerance" in a sloppy product. That work can balance the mechanism, seal the pads and even fiddle with tone holes; but it can't do some of the hard things like narrowing the bore here and there.
So, I would agree that some random quantity of clarinets are fatally flawed and uncorrectable. It seems, for example, that when buying a new Buffet, the challenge is to identify the one in a dozen or so that can be "corrected" to bring it close to its intended design. I was unfortunate enough to end up with one of those Buffet R13 A clarinets that had had the upper reamer run too far into the top of the upper joint, forever condemning it to a sharp left hand clarion register.
Deming took the concept of assembling quality products from pieces with centered and narrow distributions of to Japan when USA manufacturers measured their processes by production speed.
My guess is that Yamahas are simply more precisely built than their European competitors.
Bob Phillips
|
|