Into the Black Hole (part 3)

How low (in price) can you go?

Go on Amazon or eBay and you can find lots of imported Chinese clarinets sold directly by the Chinese companies, some at preposterously low prices — plastic B♭ horns starting at under $70, for instance. There also are E♭, A, G(!), and C instruments, with the C clarinets starting at more like $150. And they’re terrible, right?

A decade or so ago most of them would have had pot metal keys that would bend if you looked at them funny, and bad designs, bad pads, bad construction, bad all around. If you took one to a technician to get it fixed up they’d politely tell you “no”. But in recent years, at least some of the Chinese manufacturers have been improving their quality — in some respects.

Which is not to say a $150 clarinet is actually likely to be good. But can it be made good?

Into the Black Hole

There’s a person in New Mexico, Windy Dankoff, who several years ago owned and liked a Lyrique 570 C — though he took it upon himself to fix up some deficiencies when he first bought it; he doesn’t seem to think Tom Ridenour did much of anything to improve it post-factory:

Ridenour fit and finish is mediocre. And, it wasn’t tested or treated with any critical care. A couple of corks were too squishy so I had to replace them. I had to fine-tune a few toneholes too, and trim down the top of the socket of the lower joint to bring its top notes up in pitch (and close an inner gap).

But then he decided to buy a hard rubber C clarinet from an eBay vendor, songtielun, for about $150 plus about $50 shipping from China. He thought it might turn out to be okay as a spare instrument. What he got definitely had problems with intonation, burrs in some tone holes, tight springs, and tenon/receiver length mismatches. But the materials were good, the pads were nice and were well installed, corks were overly thick but good, the overall design was mostly sound and the screws and rods were high quality. “I took it out of the case (a nice one),” he wrote, “put my favorite B♭ mouthpiece on it, and WOW! I was amazed by the rich sound and the quality feel.” The problems were fixable, and Dankoff fixed them, and ended up with a horn he loved — better than the $1200 Lyrique, which he decided to sell.

And since then, he’s sort of gone into the C clarinet business. He buys instruments from songtielun, spends five or six hours on each fixing up the issues, and sells them for $650 under the name BLACK • HOLE Clarinets. His second tuned-up C clarinet went to Phil Pedler, administrator of the clarinetpages.info forum, who wrote a rave review.

$650 for a fine-tuned instrument, or $1500 for a more or less straight from the factory one? Let me think about that for about eight seconds.

I ordered a BLACK • HOLE.

Tune up

Dankoff starts working on a clarinet after he gets an order for it — that way he can address any special requests or particular needs the customer might have. He sent me a few emails during the time he worked on the clarinet. Some were progress reports. There was an email asking about preferences for key positions, especially for the left pinky. Today, two weeks after I placed the order, he finished his work, and he sent a copy of his log sheet showing what had been done:

Note a couple of definitely serious issues: Severely tight corks and an oversized tenon that would pretty much prevent the average buyer from even being able to put the clarinet together, and an upper joint that had to be shortened by 2 mm to bring the instrument into tune. They seem to do some things really well at the factory, and some things mind bogglingly badly. But those things are fixable.

Should be in my hands pretty soon.

Dankoff has some other interesting stuff on his website. He’s figured out how to tune up a vintage Pruefer Silver Throat B♭ clarinet to get a good, relatively easy to blow instrument, and I guess he has a stash of them he’ll tune up and sell you. And he’s developed a way of turning a tenor sax mouthpiece into an oversize alto clarinet mouthpiece, played with a tenor sax reed, that a number of people on the forums rave about. I don’t have anything resembling a reason to buy either, though. Not today, anyway.