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Re: Long Eb/Bb

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2021-04-04 22:14

Klarnt wrote:

> Wouldn't it be nice if there was a Long Bb? If we had one it
> would keep a similar timbre to the lower half of the Clarion
> register. If you don't have short pinkies, you could easily
> trill or play phrases without sacrificing C,B, or Bb. No more
> airy/weak trills is a plus! Right? You could play music that
> demand alot of C to Bb action & not get two very different
> sounds!

The downside to more hardware at the bottom of the clarinet is the possibility of increased confusion about which key is which. I have one clarinet that had a LH Ab/Eb on it. After a couple of months I removed it. The extra posts are still on the clarinet, but the key sits in a drawer. I found it more often than not in my way when using the other standard keys and too rarely of benefit to be worth the risk of accidentally hitting it when I wanted to play LH E/B or F#/C#. Maybe practice would have made things easier, but my other clarinets don't have the extra key. OTOH my bass clarinet's low Eb key (which I confess I've never tried to use as a Bb) is a reach for my right hand. It might be easier on the smaller (soprano) instrument, but I'd still have to reach over RH E/B and F#/C# to get to it.

An "airy/weak" quality is not necessarily endemic to the standard throat Bb fingering. It may not be ideally resonant or perfectly in tune, but it can be played with clarity, if the reed and mouthpiece combination is responsive, and improved with resonance fingerings, if there's time in the music.

> In my opinion, the current throat Bb is a outdated
> compromise that had more than enough time to be fixed.

That same clarinet that had the LH Ab/Eb, a Patricola C clarinet that I bought several years ago, has a very effective mechanism for correcting the throat Bb problem. It's one of the features I like most about the instrument. Unlike Mazzeo's attempt to do something similar, Patricola's mechanism doesn't require the player to change any of his normal fingering habits. I don't know if Patricola's solution is protected by a specific patent, but I think it's a good solution to an age-old problem. I suspect there have been other proprietary mechanisms added to clarinets but, because they haven't AFAIK been picked up by Buffet, Selmer or Yamaha, they aren't known to most of us.

Karl

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