Tips & Tricks for Taking Apart a Clarinet

Video Transcript

Hi! My name is Leslie Burnick and I’m speaking on behalf of expertvillage.com and today I’m going to talk about disassembling the clarinet. So you have just finished practicing or finished the rehearsal and you want to take the clarinet apart. So the very first thing you should do is take the reed off. Because again this little tiny piece of wood is very fragile and you do not want it to break as you are taking everything apart. So you take the reed off, you can wipe it off some with your fingers. I generally tend to just wipe it off in my mouth just to make it not quite so wet, put it away, you know in whatever kind of a reed case you have, the next thing you are going to do is again you want to dry out the inside of the clarinet with a swab and then drop the swab, the weighted part of the swab through the clarinet, pull the other end and again as far as disassembly you can do it in any order you want, just out of habit, I tend to start with a bell, again you are just going to, you are not going to be able to bend these keys here very easily, so you just kind of grab on, release the bell, put it in the little part here, this is the part that is the most difficult. This is what you want to be more careful with because this is a little piece that can tend to get broken or the little cork can come off. So again you are going to just grab each side and twist gently and take these apart, you put that piece away, take the top part of the body and put that away and then just separate the barrel and the mouthpiece. Generally you are going to keep the ligature on the mouthpiece. They should come with a little mouthpiece cap. This just keeps everything protected and then also the mouthpiece cap also comes in handy when you are say for instance playing a rehearsal, and everybody stops for a while and you want to just protect your reed, so you just put that on top and then you just put it away. Be very careful when you are taking your clarinet apart, that you put the piece back in the correct spot and you put them the correct way. If you find that you have got to close your case and it would not close, do not force it. Obviously something is the wrong way so you just need to find out what the problem is.

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