Premium Grenadilla or Green Line Composite (HUH???)

kris

kris

Please forgive my lack of knowledge here... when I last played regularly, we called clarinets either "plastic" or "wood." Never really thought much past that concept. :emoji_relaxed:

I have been looking at professional clarinets and realized I don't understand the materials.... I'm assuming grenadilla is what "wood" clarinets are made of? Then what is this "green line composite?"

For now my intermediate level Selmer CL210 will be fine... one of these days I'll be able to justify upgrading, but for now, I must work on the theory that if it was good enough for high school it is good enough for community band. I actually really like my clarinet, but one does long for a professional model.....
 
As well as plastic, there is/was also ebonite (used from the 19th century onwards), although I suppose technically it is a type of plastic but it's made from hard rubber but can can varying amounts of synthetic plastic added.

AFAIK green line composite is a resin with powdered grenadilla or other wood suspended, so it has many of the properties of actual wood (and don't forget, it's highly debatable whether any different materials have properties that actually affect the sound, as you can tell from the fact that metal clarinets don't sound significantly different)

This is "green" or eco friendly because rather than chopping down a rainforest to make a clarinet, it uses the otherwise useless offcuts of the wood to powder up.
 
In addition to what Pete said, the great advantage of Greenline clarinets and oboes is that they will never crack when going from a humid to a dry climate as grenadilla instruments are prone to do.

Any material ground to a fine powder and compressed with resins that duplicates the density of grenadilla is going to sound and respond like a true wooden clarinet. It is true marketing genius that came up with the idea of using the shavings and sawdust from the cutting and shaping of the grenadilla blocks while making instruments as the raw material for a composite woodwind. I have played the Buffet Greenline and the grenadilla clarinets side by side and they are hard to tell apart in tone and response.
 
The thing that's amusing to me is that the Greenline horns have the same prices as the grenadilla ones. Why that's amusing is because the Greenline, as Pete Thomas mentions, is made from what would have been going into the incinerator. I just think I should pay less for a horn that is 95% wood. Hey, knock 5% off the price, then!

Take a look at http://www.blackwoodconservation.org/greenline.html for a more thorough rundown about the Greenline creation process (i.e. pressure treated wood with carbon fiber). Well, it does do a bit for conservation.

As Pete Thomas mentions, it's probable that material doesn't make that much of a difference. Thickness and density might. The Greenline instrument is supposed to be lighter. If it's the same density as standard grenadilla, the thickness must be different. Something has to make the weight different!

I do go back to the idea that the bore is what makes the horn perform. Hmmm. I seem to remember that the B12 is supposed to have a bore very similar to the R13 ....

Anyhow, the new E11 France model is supposed to be lacquered wood. I wonder if we'll hear arguments about lacquer vs. no lacquer.
 
pete said:
As Pete Thomas mentions, it's probable that material doesn't make that much of a difference. Thickness and density might. The Greenline instrument is supposed to be lighter. If it's the same density as standard grenadilla, the thickness must be different. Something has to make the weight different!
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According to the article you linked to the weight is the same as a "traditional" wooden clarinet.
 
One more ingredient...

...not usually thought of when discussing clarinets, is that "ebonite" (hard rubber) clarinets contained a significant amount of lead in the rubber compound.

Just why this was the case, I have never been able to track down, but in the case of one "hulked" old clarinet that I bought especially for the purpose, a wipe-down sample (standard procedure for detecting lead presence in industrial hygiene circles) turned up high enough lead levels for my former agency (OSHA) to have taken action should it be used in an employment setting. Not a good thing.

(Getting rid of it once the test turned up so positive was not an easy thing. My staff recoiled at the idea of dumping it in the regular trash, so I had to seek out a lead remediation firm and have the bagged and tagged instrument binned with their removal wastes.)

Lead was used in small amounts in many different products before the health issues involved became widely known. (Lead-based paint is the salient example here.) But, as for why it was used here, the reasoning is still a mystery.

The speculation that my industrial hygienists engaged in following the receipt of the test's results ranged from "I dunno" to "Maybe it was used as a lubricant during the extrusion of the (unmachined) blanks". (Lead has been used in this fashion in the past, but generally only for metal extrusion, not that of plastics (of which rubber, being a natural plastic is a member).The people who used the material are long time dead, so there's no point in asking them. And the literature on clarinet making (in this case, I think it was the Rendall book) only mentions the presence of the material, not the reason for its inclusion.

In the eight or so years that I was actively looking into this, I never got a definitive reason for the inclusion of lead in the raw material used.

Current (made of ABS) plastic clarinets contain no lead. Just what is coming out of China and India, I can't say.

It would be interesting to see if our Chinese friends are using a modern, safe formulation of hard rubber, or the traditional one from years gone by. Knowing what we do about Chinese product safety, I'd test one again, just to make sure.
 
Terry, while you were at it, did you test any mouthpieces for lead content?
 
Come to think of it...

...I don't know if I ever had that cross my mind before this very instant. Of course, I know that they are made of hard rubber as well, but I was so focused on the clarinet that I missed the mouthpieces completely.

When we get back from our upcoming vacations, I'll do a bit of digging and see where I got that information from. Unlike many of my books, the Rendall volume is easy to get to.

No chance of testing any more materials for free however - all of my industrial hygienists have moved on at this point, and I daren't ask any employee of the current supervision group for fear of getting them fired.
 
retread said:
Just to be on the safe side, I won't chew on my Lyrique.
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The problem with lead exposure is that you don't have to directly get your mouth on it to have significant exposure, and handling the contaminated object(s) is enough to get transferable amount into play. The normal person touches his/her face and mouth a goodly number of times every few minutes, and lead exposures have been commonly transferred to the mouth (where the ingestion occurs) in this fashion since we started worrying about it in the 1930's.

The only effective means of control is complete omission or encapsulation. Absent that (for trades like plumbing with cast iron pipe, or the manufacturing of a wonderful substance called lead wool), the controls consist of special clothing, no smoking (or chewing) in the workplace, and washup before meals and at the end of the day.

You'll know if you have problems when the dreaded blue line appears on your gums...or when you go sterile...
 
pete said:
As Pete Thomas mentions, it's probable that material doesn't make that much of a difference. Thickness and density might. The Greenline instrument is supposed to be lighter. If it's the same density as standard grenadilla, the thickness must be different. Something has to make the weight different!
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jbtsax said:
According to the article you linked to the weight is the same as a "traditional" wooden clarinet.
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Actually, I didn't link to the article for weight; I based my point off of Pete Thomas' post. I've heard the, "It's lighter," comment from a few folks. My point is that if it's lighter, you've obviously changed something in the design to make it that way.
 
SOTSDO said:
Current (made of ABS) plastic clarinets contain no lead. Just what is coming out of China and India, I can't say.
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As far as the lead part is concerned, I think Jason Dumars commented on SOTW that engraving some Chinese saxophones made his skin break out. I dunno.

In any event, you've just got to try to come up with a joke that involves hard rubber mouthpieces, lead and alto clarinets :p.
 
Last year, there were a number of Chinese technocrats who were executed for their part in poisoned cooking oil and other consumer products. However, lead poisoning isn't quite as immediate, so the punishment might not be as swift and sure.
 
Now, I've just gotta find a product that combines lead, mercury, CFCs and releases toxic gas when burned. Let's see. Hmmm. That's about the description of any laptop computer ....
 
pete said:
Now, I've just gotta find a product that combines lead, mercury, CFCs and releases toxic gas when burned. Let's see. Hmmm. That's about the description of any laptop computer ....
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...or what's awaiting the average commuter at ~7:30AM.
 
... or what's in your average Prius :p.

Y'know, I should start a rumor about how adding lead to the brass mix on a sax or how lead-plated keywork on a clarinet improves your tone. Hey, lead is almost as dense as gold and you know that gold plating makes everything better. Try lead, instead. It's cheaper. Hey, you could probably replate your entire alto sax for about $5.

:emoji_rage:
 
Anybody want to buy one of my new lead pipe cinch ligatures?
 
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