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Re: Gearheads

Author: NOLA Ken
Date: 2022-08-16 18:28

This "gear" issue with students always makes me uncomfortable because in looking back I have realized that I am one of those people for whom gear has made a big difference - both in discouraging me as a youth with little knowledge and few resources for equipment and in rekindling my passion in my later years.

I readily admit to having become a gearhead after forty-five years away from the clarinet. I am not and never was going to be a great clarinetist. But I'm having a hell of a good time discovering all of the technical fine points of the clarinet and finding out how to make it do what I want that I missed as a youth. That has taken a lot of practice and more gear than any reasonable amateur should own. Maybe if I had had good gear to start with I wouldn't have dropped out for those forty-five years. My college teacher didn't like the clarinet I entered college with, and it's still a bit of disappointment compared to others I've acquired since. It does play much better now after I learned more about its idiosyncrasies and went through a bucket full of mouthpieces to find one that would work well.

To me, the "best" gear for a student is that which inspires the player to strive for what they want to accomplish and elicits the kind of encouragement and mentoring necessary for them to achieve that. Gear is not the only factor involved in success, but in my experience gear can be important.

Fortunately school students have a much wider range of good affordable instruments and better mentoring then we did in the 60s. I don't think that a $6,000 instrument is necessarily the best investment for a young school student. But I suspect that by high school an old plastic Bundy like I had in high school, even a well-prepared one, is not going to go very far to inspire either the student, their standing with their peers, or the teacher. Thankfully there is now some very nice middle ground.

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Gearheads new

Fuzzy

2022-08-03 00:07