Jean Barre clarinet
- Thread starter GKern
- Start date
According to this, the Jean-Barre is a stencil of (you pick) Couesnon, SML, Martin Frères (not the US Martin Band Instruments), Malerne or Thibouville. It's highly dependent on how old the horn is.
There have been a bunch of folks that have posted here and elsewhere about both Couesnon and SML and that they're really nice horns. I bought my wife an older SML clarinet and I rather like it. We've got a couple of posters with somewhat newer SMLs and they're both nice looking and nice playing horns. Malerne horns are also fairly well regarded and clarinets were their specialty.
Thibouville is connected to practically every French manufacturer that was in existence in the past 200ish years. They were amalgamated into Couesnon in the 1930s.
The only concern I'd have about the horn would be if it's a high pitch instrument. That's an intonation standard where concert A=457hz. There are only two ways to check: put the horn up to another modern Bb clarinet and if it looks about the same length, no worries. Or play with a digital tuner and see if the majority of the horn is badly out of tune -- the difference between the modern intonation standard (A=440hz) and high pitch is almost a half-step, so it will be badly out of tune with an electronic tuner, but in tune with itself.
There have been a bunch of folks that have posted here and elsewhere about both Couesnon and SML and that they're really nice horns. I bought my wife an older SML clarinet and I rather like it. We've got a couple of posters with somewhat newer SMLs and they're both nice looking and nice playing horns. Malerne horns are also fairly well regarded and clarinets were their specialty.
Thibouville is connected to practically every French manufacturer that was in existence in the past 200ish years. They were amalgamated into Couesnon in the 1930s.
The only concern I'd have about the horn would be if it's a high pitch instrument. That's an intonation standard where concert A=457hz. There are only two ways to check: put the horn up to another modern Bb clarinet and if it looks about the same length, no worries. Or play with a digital tuner and see if the majority of the horn is badly out of tune -- the difference between the modern intonation standard (A=440hz) and high pitch is almost a half-step, so it will be badly out of tune with an electronic tuner, but in tune with itself.