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Re: Why not Bopane ?

Author: SecondTry
Date: 2023-05-30 21:27

While I cannot speak to whether Mopane will ultimately prove a comparable substitute for Grenadilla I am nonetheless skeptical that if the two woods are comparable, why we are only beginning to see more Mopane clarinets emerge (to wit: Buffet) only as Grenadilla becomes more scarce.

One or more factors comes to mind. The first, and I hope the case, is that clarinet players are change adverse and that manufacturers didn't want to introduce this otherwise excellent material paradigm shift before necessary.

The second is if Mopane wood truly generates different harmonics that aren't associated with the ideal clarinet sound.

And the third is the dimensional stability of the wood and cost to machine it. Owners want a product that shape shifts no more so than Grenadilla, and manufacturers want a raw material that doesn't suffer catastrophic failure more frequently than Grenadilla, finding the time (i.e. $) spent on machine it wasted if say, catastrophic degrees of cracking during production, finds it not much more valuable than scrap wood after the time put into in on the lathe.

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