 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: smokindok
Date: 2023-01-16 09:34
SecondTry's clarinet mute construction project reminded me to look around for trusted reviews of the Buffet ClariMate, now that it has been available for a few weeks. Indeed, there is one out there; a thorough and quite objective review by Bret Pimentel, complete with real world video/sound clips. If you have any interest in this device, this is well worth checking out. It is posted on his excellent website, which is a tremendous resource for woodwind doublers.
https://bretpimentel.com/review-clarimate-digital-clarinet-mute-by-buffet-crampon/
Many thanks to Bret for doing this informative piece!
John
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Author: smokindok
Date: 2023-01-17 01:22
Sean,
I think this paragraph in Bret's review answers your question:
"The 'active reed' has a simple non-electronic device that sits inside the mouthpiece to detect pressure on the reed. As I understand it, this pressure is supposed to affect pitch, but I was unable to get the reed properly calibrated, so I wasn’t able to test this. I got an error message from the apps over and over during the calibration process. A Buffet representative kindly walked me through several potential solutions, including trying ligatures other than the one I usually use, but we were unable to solve the problem."
My understanding of this is that he was playing the ClariMate without the "active reed" system enabled, so there was no lip pressure data being received by the device. If no lip pressure data is being received, the ClariMate must default to, as you correctly describe it, an auto-tune type pitch generation.
This would be like playing a Yamaha WX5 with the "recorder" type mouthpiece instead of the "reed" type mouthpiece. I assume the Clarimate "active reed" works similarly to the Yamaha WX5 "reed", having a mechanical lever arm that moves with varying lip pressure on the "reed", generating a position signal that gets sent to the control module. Dialing in the lip pressure signal through the controls on a WX5, to give something close to a realistic response, is fairly tricky and time consuming to do, so I am not surprised that this may present a "challenge" on the Clarimate.
John
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Author: Bret Pimentel
Date: 2023-01-17 05:30
> My understanding of this is that he was playing the ClariMate
> without the "active reed" system enabled, so there was no lip
> pressure data being received by the device. If no lip pressure
> data is being received, the ClariMate must default to, as you
> correctly describe it, an auto-tune type pitch generation.
This is correct, but in case this point wasn't clear: the ClariMate prevents the clarinet from producing its natural sound, and replaces it with a synthesized sound. That's what you're hearing in the video: a synthesizer being triggered, not a "real" clarinet sound that has been auto-tuned.
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2023-01-17 21:13
Thanks for doing this review Bret (I see you've chimed in above).
Man, IMHO do you have a great (natural) clarinet tone!
Also IMHO, this device, like synthetic reeds were 30 years ago, lies at the infancy of bridging the gap between natural playing and the introduction of something synthetic, whether reed, sound, or both.
I suspect that someday we may laugh at this device's relative immaturity in the digital and muting space as we do today IBMs initial offering into the personal computing space in the 1980s, much that today Buffet's new device is is both, IMHO, paradoxically remarkable, and deficient all at the same time.
As I become more appreciative of the fact that sound enclosures for player and instrument, rather than just the latter, provide true sound muting, and that the former's portability is highly limited I can accept the ClariMate being much better than nothing for the traveling musician, but in its current form hardly a substitute for all the nuances of actual play: not that anyone has suggested it is. 
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