4 ms·

Brass and woodwind instruments are very different beasts though. Plastic clarinets for instance are mostly found in marching bands due to their inferior (bright

Brass and woodwind instruments are very different beasts though. Plastic clarinets for instance are mostly found in marching bands due to their inferior (brighter) sound, and those instruments are certainly not all plastic. Most woodwind instruments are mechanically intricate, so I'd be impressed if someone could make a pTrumpet version of a clarinet or bassoon (I'd be just as impressed by a pFrenchHorn). Note the difference in sound between a plastic and wooden recorder, one of the simplest woodwinds. I played on a plastic bassoon for the first year, and they do not sound good at all.

crdb 11y ago
FWIW I consider the Yamaha YHR-862 horns to be your pFrenchHorn: at around $3,000 not exactly ultra cheap, but a lot of players have owned one as their first double horn. Mass manufactured, good enough for orchestra playing, can take an unbelievable amount of damage (I took the valves out myself for heavy duty maintenance, something I would never do on my gold brass 1103), a gateway to the much more expensive Alexanders that an all-brands trial will inevitably result in you purchasing... I think Yamaha is trying the same approach with pianos but do not believe (from experience) their officious claim that their grands are anywhere close to Steinways. There is nothing in the world like a Model C or D, yet.
stan_rogers 11y ago
They don't have to be horrible. Boosey & Hawkes made a particularly nice composite clarinet (many moons ago now - I bought mine more than forty years ago) that didn't sell particularly well, since it had the minor disadvantage of being somewhat more expensive than a low-end wooden instrument. (It was also heavy enough that your right thumb would notice after a long session.) Longitudinal glass fibre and some heavy filler in the resin; it was probably a lot more expensive to fabricate then than it would be now, especially if the instrument has a conical rather than cylindrical bore, and I'm sure the materials could be optimized a lot more easily on a computer rather than by the trial-and-error of the day.

crdb 11y ago

FWIW I consider the Yamaha YHR-862 horns to be your pFrenchHorn: at around $3,000 not exactly ultra cheap, but a lot of players have owned one as their first double horn. Mass manufactured, good enough for orchestra playing, can take an unbelievable amount of damage (I took the valves out myself for heavy duty maintenance, something I would never do on my gold brass 1103), a gateway to the much more expensive Alexanders that an all-brands trial will inevitably result in you purchasing... I think Yamaha is trying the same approach with pianos but do not believe (from experience) their officious claim that their grands are anywhere close to Steinways. There is nothing in the world like a Model C or D, yet.

stan_rogers 11y ago

They don't have to be horrible. Boosey & Hawkes made a particularly nice composite clarinet (many moons ago now - I bought mine more than forty years ago) that didn't sell particularly well, since it had the minor disadvantage of being somewhat more expensive than a low-end wooden instrument. (It was also heavy enough that your right thumb would notice after a long session.) Longitudinal glass fibre and some heavy filler in the resin; it was probably a lot more expensive to fabricate then than it would be now, especially if the instrument has a conical rather than cylindrical bore, and I'm sure the materials could be optimized a lot more easily on a computer rather than by the trial-and-error of the day.