(Hello. This was supposed to have appeared last night; however, apparently Blogger was as sick as I was. I was puking, he was crashing. Anyway, sorry for the delay. Thanks, and back to your regularly scheduled blog.)

Here's $5, Kid, Go Buy A Gee-Gaw

For about the past four days my sister's been harping on poor Taytie. It's always something where she's concerned. This time she's been harping about him because he spends all his money at the music store. Never mind that it's his money to spend, of course. "He goes for his guitar lesson every week, then spends another hour there buying stuff that I don't even know what it is!"

I wanted to reply to her, "You know, Einstein, that could be because you don't play the guitar." But since I'm nice, and since our relationship has been pretty good lately, I gave her the kind version of that, which was, "Well, you know, that's one of the great things about playing a musical intrument. There are just so many little doo-dads and gee-gaws and knick-knacks and gizmos you can buy for it. It's a whole different world." And funnily enough I said this to her while I was opening the package I'd just received in the mail, which was full of E-flat clarinet reeds.

So see, he gets it honest from his old auntie.

For a clarinet player, reeds are the main attraction. I mean, you gotta have them, there are 65,000 different brands and kinds, and, as an added factor, you can always blame a shitty performance on a reed. I like that in a doo-dad. Reeds are cool because of the boxes they come in. Square cardboard boxes with different colors and geometric patterns and logos. They look like European cigarette boxes. You know, nowadays they even have flavored reeds (I don't think we're talking high quality cane used here, they're marketed to kids), and a solution you can soak a reed in to flavor it yourself. Mmmmm, cinnamon reeds. I might play more if I had a cinnamon reed.

Then of course you have to hold the reed onto the mouthpiece, so you need a ligature. A ligature comes with your horn - it's silver, thin, and has two screws on it. It's generally not worth much. Therefore you need to choose from the thousands of designer ligatures out there for sale, in all shapes, sizes, and materials. I personally have a BG ligature, which is gold in color. Mr M has a Spriggs, which looks something like a barbed wire fence wrapped around his mouthpiece.

You must have cork grease, and everybody makes a version. Most are in sticks that look like Chapstick (witness my mother, years ago, talking about that new lip balm she liked so much - you can guess what she picked up and spread on her lips), but some new fancy ones are retractable and look like a white lipstick, and some, including what I use, come in a little pot. A plastic pot - they don't come wrapped in a bit of marijuana.

Then of course, I sport what I call the geeky neckstrap. This is one of those awful neckstraps saxophone players wear, but since I have a slight numbness of hand, the clarinet version of the geeky neckstrap does me well. There is also something out there that serves the same purpose, only it's a T-shaped bar you sit on. OK, let me see if I can explain. An upside-down "T," you sit on the horizontal bar, while the vertical line goes up between your legs (so to speak) and the clarinet rests on the tip of the vertical bar. It looks goofy and is virtually impossible to use while wearing a skirt. I was going to actually try one of these things at Clarinetfest, but the booth was closed. Shame.

Hey, does your thumb hurt? You can buy thumbrest cushions that fit on your horn for anywhere from 98 cents to $42. And if 42 bucks isn't enough of your money to spend, you can get one of the really fancy ones. They actually have to be mounted onto your instrument with screws (screws in my RC? Never!) and will set you back about $200. I've actually played a clarinet that had one of these, and it's quite nice, if not a bit strange to get used to. Still - I really like my thumbs, they set me apart from the apes (and some would say that's about all that does), but I don't know that I worry about their comfort $200 worth.

Everyone has spit, don't they? It's a proven fact. So no clarinet goes unswabbed. Swabs can be cotton, felt, or, preferably, silk. In school we used to make them from handkerchiefs tied to a piece of string and weighted down with some kind of fishing hee-gee. But that was kid stuff. Silk's where it's at these days, even if I don't quite understand it, because surely cotton absorbs more spit.

There are even designer pieces of the horn. Barrels (the joint of the horn just below the mouthpiece) - I have a Moening barrel that looks something like the radiator of a car, only it never meshed well with the RC, so it's now abandoned in my clarinet box. Mr M has a barrel made of Delrin which sounds nice but looks like hell. It's a black monolith of a thing with no silver ringing around its ends. I call it the "after market part." It just looks like it doesn't fit there. At Clarinetfest this year the big item was the Backun bell. And make no mistake, they were cool. A smooth wooden bell that made a horn sound like it had just descended from heaven. At $550 a pop, however, I'd have about as much chance of floating to heaven for a long weekend as I would affording one.

(Oh, and by the way, and I guess it goes without saying - mouthpieces? Nobody, but nobody uses the mouthpiece the horn comes with. You must buy someone else's designer mouthpiece.)

Then you've got your reed cases, replacement pads for keys, extra cork, mouthpiece cushions (so your teeth don't scuff up your mouthpiece), reed cutters, stuff like key and bore oil (which I've never used), oh, and you can't forget a tuner and a metronome and a set of teensy tinsy screwdrivers, and everyone should really have a peg to stand their horn on when still assembled but not in use.

Then there's the weird stuff. If one would flip the lid to my clarinet box, they might find a combination of any or all of the above products of various ages and conditions and in total disarray. But they'd also see the weird stuff.

I've recently become way too dependent on Lip-Ease tooth cushions. I have a bad problem of biting when I play, and therefore, after about an hour I develop something of a hole in my bottom lip where my teeth have dug in. So I buy these "cushions." Bit of poetic license the Lip-Ease people have, because to them a cushion is a piece of stretchy plastic you fold over and affix to your bottom teeth. But who cares - they've been working so far and they're cheap as chips. They can call them anything they want to.

And in a stunning admission, I've also occasionally been taken in by the clarinet versions of snake-oil salesmen. I currently have something floating around in my clarinet box that was guaranteed to give me better breath support. It's still floating around in there unused, because I've yet to figure out how it works. It's supposed to work on a suck-and-blow premise, blowing against pressure to build up your diaphragm. Or something. Anyway, there's no pressure to be built in this thing. You just blow and blow and suck and suck into the tube, and you may as well be blowing and sucking into thin air because it's the same feeling. I honestly don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if an integral part of the machine was missing when it was shipped to me. All I know is that I can't make heads or tails of it, and it's just lying there in my clarinet box looking like a cross between a marital aid and a breastpump.

In catalogues they have another version of a "diaphragm builder" they sell, generally for around $25. It's a plastic machine where you blow into a tube and make a disc rise in the chamber. I never ordered one of these. Because I already have two - that I brought home with me from the hospital when I've had surgery. It's the exact same machine as the hospital gives you to blow into so you don't get pneumonia. "Yes! Your playing will improve and your lungs will remain influenza-free! Who could ask for more?"

I'm sure it's the same for every instrument out there. Band instruments, rock instruments, stringed instruments. We could go on forever about those catalogues and the neverending list of gee-gaws - um, sorry - improvement items they sell. There's one thing they don't sell in those catalogues, though. And I don't have any lying around in the disarray of my clarinet box, either.

In fact, I haven't been able to find it anywhere.

I wanna know where I can order a box of practice.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* And now, from the lovely confines of Poderosa East, comes Mr M with the acrojudging:
"Howdy, howdy, howdy! kay. Enough of that.
First, I want to award the "Least Hackneyed" award to every one of you for not citing that old joke about Cleveland, viz, "....The first prize is a night in Cleveland. The second prixze is two nights in Cleveland." Besides, Beatrix already mentioned that earlier...as I knew she would.
Second, there is no second.
Third, let's get to the awards.
Honorable Mention goes to Venice' non-acroic parenthetical burp "Well, that's about all I can say about Ohio...."
Runner Up goes to Lily, with "Garfield assassinated. Final resting location? Downtown" because she knew that Garfield was from Cleveland, and she has balls enough to parade her erudition in front of us all.
The winner, across the board, though, is DeepFatFriar, not only for the consistently trenchant, high-quality responses, but for the continuity of the whole (which isn't to be judged on, but I'm making the damned rules here tonight). I'm not awarding this for one acro, but for the whole shebang. (DFF makes an epic out of everyhing. Nothing granular about that guy.)
Vaya con huevos.
Capt. A."
* Thank you, Captain.
* Hey, what's that autoharp tuner doing in my clarinet box?