Author: JHowell
Date: 2015-06-21 07:39
I got my first Buffet R-13 when I was a junior in high school, and was extremely proud of it. I carried it to school under my coat so that it wouldn't get cold, and when I visited a college and the dorm room was freezing I slept with it. I lived in fear that it would crack, and I oiled it religiously, putting little bits of paper under the pads so they wouldn't get oiled and sticky. I read somewhere that Hans Moennig said that oiling deadened the sound of the instrument, and thought to myself, "Well, Hans Moennig is in the business of fixing instruments, he doesn't care if my clarinet cracks!" I kept on oiling.
It cracked.
My teacher in college shared the opinion that oiling the bore did nothing but deaden the sound of the instrument. So, my first new instrument in college, I continued to be careful about temperature, but didn't oil, somewhat nervously.
It did not crack. Even when I moved to New Mexico. Sold it after 8 or 9 years, still not cracked. Since then, I've had quite a few instruments, none of them oiled. Some have cracked, some have not. A crack isn't the end of the world; you have it pinned, you play the danged thing. I can't prove that oiling deadens the sound of an instrument; since every billet and every clarinet is different there is no way to establish a control for such an experiment, and what constitutes "deadening of the sound" is hopelessly subjective. But by the same token, nobody can prove that oiling prevents cracks. It seems worth noting that when you buy a Buffet clarinet, there is nothing about oiling it in the accompanying literature, which seems odd -- if oiling really prevented cracking then Buffet ought to include a bottle of bore oil and instructions for its use. And then refuse warranty on any cracked instrument that seems insufficiently oiled.
For the record, I don't care if you oil your clarinet; I don't care how YOUR clarinet sounds and I won't be buying it used, so if it makes you feel like you're preventing a crack, go ahead. But I feel obliged to offer a counterpoint to the posters who reply to every topic with "oil the bore!" Of the four clarinetists in my orchestra, with well over 100 years collective professional experience, none of us owns a bottle of bore oil.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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