Mar 5
Have you ever wondered how a Yamaha recorder head looks inside? They are obviously not supposed to fall apart like this, but in some rare cases they do. It's an easy fix but quite fascinating to see one from the inside
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Have you ever wondered how a Yamaha recorder head looks inside? They are obviously not supposed to fall apart like this, but in some rare cases they do. It's an easy fix but quite fascinating to see one from the inside
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Alegria Jacques Leduc [Quebec, 1972]
Sometimes you find blocks in old recorders that look nothing like they should. Often it is just mould and build-up. In this case, the block has very deep grooves. A block should actually be as smooth as possible to direct the air evenly to the labium. Grooves like these cause condensation to collect and the recorder to become hoarse very quickly. What we do then is quite simple. Using very fine sandpaper, the surface is carefully sanded down until it is even. Only a very small amount of material is removed, so the sound is not significantly altered.
we wanted to write something about boxwood instruments, because boxwood is beautiful - very fine grained and dense and stable and a little oily, which makes very smooth wood turning possible - and modern makers who make copies of old instruments have an interesting conundrum
so the instruments above are renaissance columnar recorders, and a baroque oboe, and modern makers love to go to museums and measure up old instruments for copying
and this is weirdly easier with renaissance than baroque instruments, even though the former are older - and the reason why is that over a couple of hundred years, the seasoning of boxwood took a major turn for the worse
in the older days, the way you'd season boxwood billets for instrument making was you'd turn to a rough round, and bore a hole down the centre - and then you'd stick these billets in a pile of horseshit for 20 years - and then you'd stick them in a running stream for another 20 years - and then the wood would be so fucking stable that you can find sound examples of instruments from 700 years ago
but then people started wanting their wood faster and cheaper, so the good seasoning got dropped in favour of other methods - and so instruments that are 400-500 years old and still in any kind of good enough shape to reliably copy are much rarer, because the newer ones split and cracked and warped
so if your boxwood hasn't been in the shit it's worth shit (of course modern seasoning methods are much better than the baroque methods were but still)
Today on instruments you probably haven't seen before: A small valve horn
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Cleaning a clarinet also includes the keys. Usually they become black over the years due to oxidation. More on that in a later post. Sometimes we also find the pads to be quite dirty after years of playing. Sadly a lot of times they just get yellow and dry over the years and need to be changed. But with this one we got lucky. The pads are still soft and the dirt is mostly on the surface so we can clean it with wood polish and talcum powder. What you see in the pictures is the before and after of a leather pad being cleaned
Sometimes I do find small surprises. This tone hole is red on the inside while the clarinet is made out of grenadill, a mostly black wood. There is an easy explanation for it, but I still don't see it that often. To adjust the pitch we usually use shellac or wax to fill out the hole or we file it open a bit. When using shellac or wax, it is standard practice to use one that has a similar colour to the wood. But sometimes we don't have that and then something like this happens. It is well hidden beneath the key and the player probably doesn't even know. A lovely little detail
A technical drawing of a Flageolett, done by hand on A3 paper This part shows the head as a half-cut. A half-cut is used to show the exterior and the interior of an instrument. It helps to understand how it was built and gives more details when recreating said instrument. Four different types of hatching indicate different materials. The vertical freehand lines indicate wood (the different densities indicate two different pieces of wood). The straight horizontal lines indicate ivory and the horizontal freehand lines indicate thread winding used on the joints. The least used hatching is diagonal from top left to bottom right. This one is usually used to indicate metal
drawing done by me about two years ago (2023)