Hard Rubber Clarinets Are Great Clarinets
You Just Have To Make Them Right
Ever play clarinet in grade school or high school? Your clarinet was probably crappy like mine. I started playing clarinet when I was eleven years-old on a plastic Selmer Bundy clarinet.
Eventually, I got good enough that my parents bought me a used Buffet R13, the professional clarinet of choice in the clarinet community.
The difference between the Bundy and the R13 was stark. The Bundy’s keywork was clunky and slow, and the sound was a bit tinny, while the R13 keywork was smooth and consistently produced that sort of hollow sound that one expects to hear from a clarinet. The obvious main difference between the two, though, was that the Bundy was made out of plastic, and the R13 was made out of grenadilla wood.
For most of my life, I believed that wood, specifically grenadilla wood, must impart some special sonic properties to the clarinet. After all, clarinetists in most major orchestras played on clarinets made of grenadilla wood, and even jazz clarinet great Eddie Daniels made some great albums using an R13.
But I was wrong. The clarinet manufacturers weren’t using the best material for their clarinets. They were (and largely, still are) using the most convenient and accessible material that had acceptable sonic properties. Sure, you can cut down an eighty year-old grenadilla tree and make some clarinets (or oboes, piccolos, recorders, bagpipes, etc), and, if the craftsmanship quality is good, they’ll likely sound great. It turns out, though, that clarinets made of hard rubber¹ can be at least as good, and maybe consistently better, than most grenadilla wood clarinets.
In “The Grenadilla Myth,” lifelong clarinet performer and technician, Tom Ridenour writes:
“In my own clarinet design experience I have had the rare opportunity to design clarinets in Grenadilla wood, Rosewood and Hard Rubber. It has been an eye opening, almost shocking experience. What I have found to be consistently true is when a well-made hard rubber clarinet is compared to a Grenadilla wood clarinet sharing the same acoustical design, the hard rubber turns out to be the unequivocal better in every respect: tone, tuning, response, sweeter high tones, stability and consistency in manufacture.”
The proof is in the sound and playability. Ridenour has been selling professional hard rubber clarinets for over fifteen years now, and if you search Youtube, you’ll find a large number of positive reviews from a wide variety of musicians. But why not listen to the creator, Tom Ridenour, play some classic Rose etudes on a hard rubber clarinet:
A well-constructed hard rubber clarinet, besides sounding great, is also an order of magnitude less expensive to produce. Today, professional-quality grenadilla wood clarinets² sell for as much as $8000-$11000, but a professional-quality hard rubber clarinet can be had for $2000 or less. Grenadilla wood is, well, wood. It must be processed, machined, and finished with care. In contrast, a hard rubber clarinet can be created using efficient molding processes which yield a solid, clean finish with exacting proportions. Besides being way less expensive, rubber clarinets have two other great properties: they are less likely to change pitch because of changes in temperature or humidity, and they are less likely to break or chip (and if they do break, they are much cheaper to replace).
Historically, clarinets have been made in Europe of metal, plastic, rubber, and various kinds of wood³ for over a century. Grenadilla wood, found in Africa, became a favorite after Europe’s colonialization of Africa (1881–1914) because the wood is very hard and crack-resistant.
So, if professionally-made hard rubber clarinets are way cheaper and play great, then why are professional clarinets made by the big manufacturers like Yamaha, Buffet, and Selmer still made largely from grenadilla wood?
Well, change is hard, especially when your company has been using the same manufacturing processes for decades. It’s also true that many great clarinetists have used grenadilla wood clarinets throughout their careers and simply have never tried a high-quality hard rubber clarinet. At the professional level, the myth that grenadilla wood is somehow superior to hard rubber persists.
Ironically, nearly every clarinetist agrees that the clarinet mouthpiece is more important with regards to tone production than the clarinet body, and yet the vast majority of professional clarinet players use hard rubber mouthpieces on their grenadilla wood clarinets.
If you’re a clarinetist of any ability, it’s worth looking into well-made hard rubber clarinets. Though there are a number of hard rubber clarinets on the market, Ridenour is the only one I know of that creates professional-quality hard rubber clarinets. Ridenour does not seem to do much marketing, and many people are simply unaware that they exist. Even Ridenour’s low-end hard rubber model is way better than my crappy Bundy.
[1] Most natural hard rubber — used in clarinets and many, many other products — comes from the latex produced by rubber trees. The scale of hard rubber production helps keep the cost way down though it’s debatable whether processing rubber is more eco-friendly than processing grenadilla wood.
[2] I’m talking about the common Bb soprano clarinet here. Bass clarinets made of grenadilla wood can cost as much as $17,000 . In contrast, a similar quality of professional hard rubber bass clarinet may only cost $3,000 .
[3] The Clarinet Pages is a website with lots of information about different materials used to make clarinets.
[4] There are occasionally good deals on used Ridenour clarinets on outlets like Ebay or Reverb.
