Clarinet gadgets from A to Z
I am a notorious gadget collector. Just for fun, I tried to come up with a clarinet gadget for every letter of the alphabet. The scary thing is I own every one of them! (Well, not the Uebel and the Jupiter, but everything else.) Here's my list. A Abacus. Why is an abacus a clarinet gadget? It's about those practice rules where you're supposed to play a passage correctly 3 or 5 times in a row. Some people say move pennies to mark successful reps but I can never find any pennies, and I don't have a flat space to put them on. Also I forget which side is the completed side. So I invested about $5 in a toy abacus that sits neatly on my music stand. B Breath Trainer. I have several different breath trainers, since having enough breath to finish a phrase is one of my biggest problems. Most successful so far are Expand-a-Lung and Breather Fit. C Classical Fingers. This device fits over the clarinet to train your fingers to stay close to the keys. I find it very useful on m
