Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2017-07-15 06:34
A couple of thoughts.
Please don't make the color of the wood a top priority. It's about sound, intonation, stability, and resistance to cracking--unless color correlates with poor quality.
Of course the best clarinet that's resistant to cracking, intonation changes and instability isn't made of wood in the first place. If those are your major criterion, consider a Ridenour hard rubber clarinet, or even a Backun Alpha, or even a Greenline Buffet.
As far as Buffet's wood is concerned, the R13 is made out of cheaper quality grenadilla today than in years past. This is not rumor, it's fact. I think the Festival or higher has the wood of the R13 in years gone by. It's why when Drucker, former NY Philharmonic principal, needed a new Bb that Buffet's US Rep, Francios Kloc, outfitted him with something better than the R13 he had.
It came with a left pinky Eb/Ab level that Drucker asked to have removed.
Quality grenadilla is less readily available today. Nevertheless I'm sure today's Toscas have fine wood, and yet I'll bet they can play or become out of tune, crack, swell, etc. Then again so can other manufacturer's wood clarinets.
Strongly consider an older but well maintained R13 that plays in tune if you want a more stable clarinet. The wood's had an opportunity to settle.
Last night I had a gig where I sat next to a new Festival owner/player who tried new Buffet clarinets from everyone until she found this one to play in pitch, checking it with a well known tech we both know and respect, and bought it this past winter.
Last night, when the humidity was wicked, the clarinet was for all intents and purposes unplayable. She can't get the barrel off and the pitch was all over the place.
This is not to trash Buffet, nor is it to praise them. I imagine the clarinet has to settle in. The wood you seek is much of the problem, although I hear great things about Yamaha clarinets these days--also made of wood.
And this is someone who is normally very in tune, as she was playing the Backun Alpha she got while shopping for Buffets.
Guess which clarinet she is brining to rehearsal next week?
If I were to buy right now I'd also be looking at Uebel's, and Yamahas, and probably (sigh) Buffet's too; but I might consider Greenlines in the latter, or older R13s.
That said, the correlation between wood clarinets and sound (as I've written here all to many times) is, IMHO, as at least as much market perception as reality.
Grenadilla was originally chosen (before plastic was available) because it was one of the cheaper woods to machine (it would break less in production.)
People have associated wood clarinets with quality, wouldn't pay comparably for plastic ones, and plastic clarinets were manufactured cheaply to keep costs/price at a level that consumers would buy them at.
I submit to you that a high quality made plastic clarinet would play quite well. In fact they already do: a Greenline, unless of course people believe that ground up Grenadilla shavings from the conventional product line, mixed with epoxy, give that epoxy magical properties.
The shavings are filler that Buffet would love to have people think offer the clarinet special sound qualities. Its marketing brilliance in coming out with a synthetic instrument that doesn't trash its original product line's materials, by incorporating some of those materials, in an entirely different form into the new product line.
The joke is on us. The wood isn't magic when in shavings, in fact, it never was magic when whole.
Mark my words, as quality granadilla goes away, clarinet marketers will tout new synthetic, lighter stronger more stable, better sounding materials (carbon fiber)
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