Thread: I would like to turn a Clarinet barrel on the wood lathe. To convert B flat to C

I hope this reply isn’t too late, you need to increase the length to lower the pitch.

The lengthening of any woodwind or brasswind's tube will lower its fundamental pitch.

Raising the clarinet from Bb to C is probably quite a shorter length - 12 to 22mm, I would roughly guess.

The problem in woodwind instruments tuning is that lengthening or shortening just one small section of the sounding tube doesn't result in an instrument with even tuning throughout. Yes, the lowest note may be now C, but many notes between it and a twelfth above (or an octave above in the case of flutes and saxophones) will be grossly out of tune.

This is why on older high pitch (452-460Hz) instruments their toneholes are fractionally closer together compared with otherwise identical low pitch (440Hz) instruments. Yes, their overall lengths are different, but not just in one small area.

If this were the case then the only difference between an Eb soprano clarinet and a Bb soprano clarinet would be their barrel lengths, which is certainly not the case. Instead the whole instrument is evenly lengthened for the Bb.

Vaughan
[Edited for some confusion correction on my part]

It strikes me that the body would need to be shorter rather than longer. As the body is cylindrical inside it should be easy enough to knock up a few trial pieces, firstly to get the length right and then to find out where the finger holes need to go.

Yes, burraboy you are right! Silly me, yes, a C clarinet is shorter.
I was initially thinking of a C to Bb
Folks usually desire lower pitched instruments. I've slightly edited my post above to correct my error.

Martin-Bb-C-tenors.jpg

In saxophones, the C-melody instruments are at least 10-15% smaller overall than their bigger Bb tenor brothers. As you can see in the image above the difference is quite a lot!

V