Determining Wood vs. Plastic Clarinets

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to show you how to determine whether your clarinet is wood or plastic. Most of the time if you do have, if you're a beginner, anything that is rented through any of the large companies is going to be pretty much plastic. They will try to fool you and think it is wood by putting a scratched grain or a wood type grain on the plastic body here made of usually resin or ABS, but the real point of determining whether it's plastic or not is to look down inside the bore of the instrument. If it's shiny in there then that means that that is a plastic instrument. In our wood clarinet here is actually hard too to determine because sometimes it can be a very closed grain, and you won't be able to distinguish the grain in the instrument, so again there, you can look in the bore, and sometimes that won't even tell you because the grain will be closed in there. But again if it's not shiny then it usually means that that is a wood clarinet. You can do a couple other small tests, take a needle and heat it up and just in an inconspicuous place, touch the needle to it and if it smells like wood, if it smells like plastic then there's your answer, but that is how to determine a wood or a plastic clarinet."