Clarinet Construction: Complications, Part 1
When I began this project, I thought that I could just have a friend who was vastly better than me just play test every single part each week to show off the results of each variation in each new barrel. Obviously, this was a far-fetched idea as this had neglected the fact that other human beings have other things to do besides test out clarinet parts for me.
After realizing I couldn’t just infinitely extract one person’s labor for my benefit, I decided to start using several other friends for barrel tests. This proved to be almost worse than the first idea, as each new player had their own sound and intonation tendencies, so every time I changed the player, a whole new litany of changes would appear. This happened to be the least scientific path I could’ve taken, so I decided to ditch that route.
The only other option that I saw fit would’ve been to test & record all of the barrels myself, which happens to be a poor option as I’m not a great clarinet player, so that may skew the data a bit. However, there will be some form of consistency surrounding the tendencies of the barrels to have certain timbres or intonation problems since I’ve now controlled the “clarinetist variable”. This is significantly more scientific than what I was doing prior to this, so this is likely the best route I can go when proceeding with this project.
With this, it’s important to recognize the fact that I can not practice nearly as much as my music-major friends, as their number one priority is to practice and become better, whilst mine is succeeding in the engineering program I’m undergoing. Because of this discrepancy in amount of time dedicated to practice, I’m more likely to have days where I’m playing much worse than normal (due to the absence of consistent practice) and that makes the “clarinetist variable” not exactly as controlled as it could be by employing music majors, but that will probably end up not being as big of a deal as I think it may be.
Besides, this gives me yet another reason to practice my instrument AND feel guilty about not practicing, so that’s always good.
