I Need A Doctor

No, not me personally. My new R-13 Buffet clarinet. This is my first brand new clarinet ever. The woman that I bought it from knew that I had played on old clarinets all my life:

1. I started on a nickel clarinet that was made during one of the World Wars (I'm not sure whether it was WW I or WW II actually) and the whole clarinet is made out of nickel and sounds a little "metallic"

2. My first wood clarinet is one that I paid $50 and my parents "matched" when I was in my senior year in academy with a "Hallmark" label

3. My 3rd (and current) clarinet is a Buffet R-13 made in 1937 and played for about 50 years by a jazz musician here in southern Maine - he was mostly a sax player but occasionally played clarinet. He was a smoker and never oiled the barrel so that clarinet was heavily damaged. It was very difficult to blow and the upper two registers were nearly unplayable, so I played 3rd clarinet because it has a marvelous lower register up through the throat Bb. I have played it for about 15 years.

Lisa knew what I was playing. She never told me that I was not supposed to play a new clarinet for longer than 30 minutes per day for the first few weeks.

Well, I played it for up to 1 - 2 hours at a time. I noticed that the tuning barrel was tight. VERY tight. After band practice last week I had a very hard time taking the clarinet apart.

The next night we got an email from Lisa with a Word document attached telling me how to "break in" the instrument and it I had difficulty taking the instrument apart to take it to a repair man for a simple adjustment.

Fortunately when we bought my daughter's 1995 R-13 clarinet from Tom Parchman, the 1st clarinetist for the Portland Symphony Orchestra, I had requested and gotten by email the name of who he recommended for working on professional level Buffet clarinets.

I made a call Thursday (8/25/05 - the 3 months anniversary of full time insurance work) and have an appointment with the man for 3:30 PM Monday afternoon to have the instrument looked at. "And don't play it until I see it," were his parting words.

Awck! I had agreed to play my clarinet for special music for Sabbath School at about 9:45 AM on Sabbath 8/27/05! Now I would not be able to play it. I tried practicing on my 1937 R-13 but I ended up borrowing my daughter's 1995 R-13 and played a duet with Jean (312 in the Church Hymnal - Near The Cross) and we had the Sabbath School members pretend that we were singing around the piano in our living room: we had them join in and sing the last verse with us!

I LOVE MUSIC! It has been so long since I have taken the time to play. And I have never had an instrument to play that was of this quality. Allison's clarinet and mine are very, very much alike and playing one is very much like playing the other. We look forward to music as a family - various duets and trios - in the future!