Barrel making day
Last week I went to Cambridge to spend a day in the workshop of Daniel Bangham to experiment with barrels and make a bespoke one that suits me and my clarinet.
The morning was spent listening to Daniel explaining about points within a barrel where pitch or tone may change and we experimented by putting rods up the instrument to find these points. Latterly we then progressed to experimenting with plastic inserts of different dimensions to see what they did to our playing.
We spend thousands of pounds on our instruments, the more professional, it’s likely, the more money is spent on the outfit. However, what Daniel was saying is that you can have a £5K instrument vs a £800 instrument and if you get the barrel right, you may well not be able to tell the difference.
Of course, he wasn’t suggesting that you buy a plastic £400 instrument and then spend the rest on just a barrel, as it is more complex than that naturally, the mouthpiece, ligature and reed also play a huge role. However, many players will spend a lot of money and time trying to get the correct combination of reed, lig and mouthpiece or will pay for physical alterations to get pitching absolute when actually, it may be just the barrel that will fix all of the issues.
The difference in length, thickness and flaring of the barrel is imperative. If I’m honest, whilst it seems obvious, I hadn’t even realised that tuning barrels were flared. However, what was even more interesting is that Daniel was implying that the best barrels tend to be more flared at the TOP rather than the bottom, so it’s more funnel shaped.
The barrel I created (loose ‘I’, Daniel did the measurements and boring, I did the woodturning and smiling!) makes a huge difference to the tone of my instrument and the pitching. Over the throat notes where tuning can be inclined to deviate, it maintains true pitch (unless I create the fault through tired embouchure!).
So, by the end of the day we each had a new barrel (mine was rosewood with a radically flared top) and had learned an infinite amount from Daniel to take away.
