Author: Max S-D
Date: 2020-11-13 21:11
With all due respect to the expertise of the users here, the advice to not buy used makes zero sense to me. I couldn't afford a new Selmer, so I bought a used one, a model 33. Did it need a few hundred in repairs? Absolutely. But even taking that into account, I saved around $7,000 compared to a new bass clarinet from Selmer and have an instrument good enough to use for the rest of my life.
I would spend six grand on a used Selmer or Buffet ten times out of ten compared to buying a new instrument from a relatively unknown brand. If you buy the Selmer or Buffet, you'll probably have an instrument for life, but if you do decide you want to move on from it someday, you'll probably be able to sell it for what you paid for it. Possibly more, even, given the cost of new bass clarinets these days, which doesn't appear to be going down. Pretty much any "budget" instrument is going to be worth half of its retail price the moment you unpack it at home.
That said, when I got my degree, the only bass clarinet I owned was a low Eb Bundy. My school had a Selmer low C instrument (Series 9 or 33, I'm not sure which anymore) that I was lucky enough to have more or less exclusive use of for the time I was there. See if your school has one you can use. If nothing else, it will give you time to save and look for a good used instrument. They don't come up often, but they do show up periodically. Let your friends know you are looking. Oftentimes a seller will start out by seeing if anyone in their network wants to buy or knows someone who wants to buy before going to auction sites or classifieds. That's how I got mine.
Five to six thousand dollars is a lot, but it might be a lot more feasible than twelve or thirteen.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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