Clarinet Care & Maintenance

Video Transcript

Hi! My name is Leslie Burnick and I am speaking on behalf of the expertvillage.com. Today I’m going to talk about care of the clarinet. The main thing with the clarinet is you do not want to get it wet. Especially if you have a wooden clarinet, wood and water do not go together very well but any clarinet should not get wet because the pads will just be ruined so you do not want your clarinet wet. Sometimes if you are in a marching band for instance, it is going to get wet, you still want to do your best job you can to protect the clarinet and the pads from getting too wet. When you are, finished playing, you have finished your rehearsal or your practice session, you are going to take your reed off. You always want to take your reed off when you are done playing because that is the best way to preserve the reed. And then again you should have a swab that either came with your clarinet or you are going to, to make sure you purchase one. I do like these silk ones, they tend to last longer and they just go through the clarinet better. You are just going to drop, there is a little weight on the end of the string, drop that through the clarinet. It really does not matter, which end you start, you can drop it through the bell. I tend to start from the mouthpiece down and then you just simply pull that and this dries off the inside of the clarinet. If you have been playing a lot you may have to run it through several times but in general just one or two times through the clarinet should be fine. If you happen to have silver keys or if you just want your clarinet to be extra shiny, you may want to just get a little small like a silver polishing cloth and you can just wipe the fingerprints off the keys. If you do have a wooden clarinet and again this would tend to be, for more advanced players occasionally you will want to apply bore oil that you would just put a little bit on a rag, rub it on the wood, and that just helps preserve the wood. Again this is something you only need to do may be once every six months or once a year. It does not have to be done that often. Again for the more advanced players, another thing you may want to have is some key oil. This is not really a necessity because chances are if you are getting your clarinet repaired, the repair technician would put it on him or herself. So basically anyplace where you would see action, you would just put literally, just like one drop, right where the screw, and then you just kind of wiggle that some and again this is mainly if you are actually having trouble with the key sticking. This is not something you have to do very often. Sometimes pads do get wet underneath them and they typically, this key right here on the side tends to, water will collect underneath that a lot when you are doing a lot of playing. You are actually going to simply put it up to your mouth and blow the water back out. That is the best way to take care of that. Sometimes you will use actually cigarette paper and put that underneath and that will help dry out the pad as well.

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