OMG

Ok so this is the cheesiest photo ever, and clearly not of my clarinet, (I almost don't want to put any photo up here at all, because it hardly does the situation justice) but I am SO excited that I am overlooking taste, format, opinion and any other emotion or situation that might be chalked up to anything less than spontaneous insanity.

Why, dear people, have I gone so off the deep-end? I just went to Twigg Music, which is a great family-run operation here in Montreal for all things brass and woodwind, and got myself a REAL clarinet. OMG. (see above, the title...it fits. My words below match my words above. Miraculous)

I have seen all these amazing looking clarinets on different craigslist spaces and places, but Twigg was having a 50-70% off sale so I decided to go check things out. I stuck myself in a room with about 4-5 different intermediate and semi-professional suckers and got to it. It was so unbelievable to hear the difference in tone and feeling in each. Some were cleaner sounding, some muckier, some had high registers that could sing a baby to sleep, others had low tones that could wake an elephant.

In the end, I went with an intermediate model that I will likely have to upgrade in a few years, but unlike violins or pianos, clarinets don't actually age that well. So it seems like the PERFECT choice, and I absolutely am ridiculously enamored, like pigeons to statues, like rain on concrete, like traffic lights of each other. Adoration, love, all these words and countless more of the same ilk and spirit to be applied.

The clarinet has a clean sound, but not too clean. Rich but a little muddy. Deep bottom tones, which are the ones I would follow to the ends of the earth.

And what made the entire thing turn from an enchanting to a completely surreal experience, was getting a Vandoren M13 mouthpiece. OMG (see above). It makes the empty, deserted room sing with old memories, dust collecting to form shapes that animate the lives there lived.

Now that it's 10pm, I really can't play it, as the neighbours will kill me, (this is not a little uke we're talking about here) but I am DYING to get it out of its case. Oh well. There will be hours to be had with this one.....