Plastic Instruments

Well, that was a lot better than the performance I attended. There was a bit at 2:32 when it suddenly seemed to go horribly out of tune - so much so that I wondered if it was some sort of mistake and someone was playing eg a B♭ clarinet part on a C instrument. I don't know how Nuvo clarinets are tuned, but I think the old Lyons ones were in C. Not that I could tell for certain that it was a clarinet - you could see 2 of them just before with one (pink) silent and one (blue) playing reasonably well in tune, then just as it went out of tune it cut to a shot of the centre of the body of the clarinet so you couldn't tell if it was still the blue one, had switched to the pink one, or was something else altogether. All in all, though, surprisingly good for inexpensive plastic instruments. Some of the brass a bit "harsh" towards the end. Am I right in thinking that it's easy to wonder away from an accurate pitch on a brass instrument whatever it's made of if the player is not very experienced? Or is that the clarinet???

There is really no reason why good quality wind instruments should not be made out of plastic. It's one of those tricky issues from an environment pov - is it better to create more plastic, or chop down more hardwood trees?

I was intrigued to see that the Clarineo uses something much more like a German system mechanism than a Boehm one. Strange! I couldn't tell wrt to the fingering though: the charts were incomprehensible, to me at least - they were upside down for a start, and it was hard to tell which keys should be pressed and which not.

I'm impressed by that orchestra. The flutes are very impressive. The horn uses rotary valves and it can be tuned in either Bb or C. It has a variety of mouthpieces so the child can see which one(s) they're happiest with and then choose an instrument to progress to accordingly.

Mr Z has a Boehm flute a couple of Irish flutes in resin. One is quite a good one - the other much cheaper. I've tried the Boehm and the weight and the stance was too much for me to deal with. If I was going to play a flute, I'd stand a better chance with either a resin Irish flute or a plastic Nuvo one.

The problem with chopping down hardwood trees is that they take such an age to grow to any reasonable size and some of them are so long-lived when left to their own devices. It's a very tricky environmental question that one.