Cleaning a Clarinet without Disassembling

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to show you how to clean your clarinet without disassembling it. First of all, we're going to start off by using my little paint brush here. I'm going to go in between the keys, get out any dust particles and whatnot in there. Usually you get some little bit of dust or some stray fabric from your case that'll shed off on to your instrument, get that all out of there. Next off, we'll take our Q-tips and I'll spray those with a little bit of Windex. You never want to spray your clarinet with Windex. It will put moisture in your keys. It'll really wreak some havoc. So I do not ever suggest that. Want to try to get in there as best you can, taking great care and not getting any on your pads or bumping the pads for that. It'll tear the pad. You kind of get in between there and take the time to get in between the chimney tone holes here. It's usually wear a lot of stuff hides. Same thing with the lower here. Get all of that out. Another thing we want to do after we're done playing, we'll go ahead and take our paper towel and wipe off the excess cork grease on our tenons, keep those clean, help the longevity of them. Now we want to take our swab here and we'll put a little bit of Windex on that too. This is perfectly fine to do while the keys are on the clarinet; it won't hurt them at all as long as you don't saturate it so the pads get wet. Go ahead and pull the swab on through. This one is a little bit smaller. Pull that on through. And that is how to clean your clarinet without disassembling."