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Buying Cheap Clarinet Reeds: Let The Buyer Beware |
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Written by Chad Criswell
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 If You Buy Cheap Reeds You May Get What You Pay For
Recently I was working with one of my beginning clarinet students who
until this lesson had been doing quite well at producing a tone. On
this occasion though she just could not seem to get anything but
squeeks and very weak sounds out of her instrument. After a few
minutes of checking her embouchure and other things I finally asked her
to let me have her clarinet. Immediately I could tell something was
wrong because the reed simply looked odd while on the mouthpiece. I
took off the reed and noticed that the cane was way too thick and the
cut on the reed seemed very irregular. I also noticed that the
hardness number on the reed was in a strange font that I had never seen
on any commercially purchased reeds I had seen at the music store.
I put the reed back on her clarinet, spritzed the mouthpiece with
disinfectant, and then tried to play on it myself. As I suspected, the
reed was the problem. Not even I could get it to play decent. I asked
the student where she got the reed from and the response gave me a
sinking feeling. Her family had bought a box of reeds off of a well
known auction site at the bargain basement cost of 100 reeds for just
$50. Considering that good quality name brand reeds
by companies like Rico or Vandoren average around $1.00 tp $2.00 per reed, this
seemed like a wonderful deal to this student and he family. Even
synthetic reeds such as Fibracells
would be far more cost effective in the long run over these generic
reeds that she had purchased. I explained to her that the reed she had
here was simply no good and that she would need to go through the big
box and try different reeds until she found one that would respond
properly for her. My gut feeling is that she will be lucky to get one
or even two decent reeds out of the whole generic box of 100.
For all of you teachers out there be aware that these shoddy reed
deals exist and that like most things you will get what you pay for if
you try to buy cheaply made clarinet reeds. I have no idea what the
brand name is on them (the reed had no label on it other than the
hardness). My personal preference for my beginners is to use Rico
reeds
Tags: cheap clarinet reeds clarinet reeds reeds rico reeds vandoren reeds rico vandoren clarinet buy reeds buy cheap clarinet reeds
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