From: "John Kilpatrick"
Subject: Re: [CB] [CB Digest]
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 00:18:13 +0100
> From: "Kevin Highley2"
> Subject: [CB] Cheap contra on Ebay
> Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 18:06:09 +0100
>
> eBay item 4376405013 looks very interesting - Too good to
be true?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 13:09:19 -0500
> From: "Gregg Bailey"
> Subject: Re: [CB] Cheap contra on Ebay
>
> Well, the picture looks like an extended range bass
clarinet.
And how about item
DON'T BID - View the seller's other items and come to your own
conclusions. These items have all been on before with several different
user names; they are "private auctions" containing catalogue pictures
and descriptions and an invitation to email the seller, and now (new)
an invitation on many of the items to buy "at a special price". The
seller usually get pulled when reported, and so-far at least two of us
have reported the scam this time round. The only obvious difference
between this set of 474 items and sets that have previously turned up
is that this time there are lots of bids on them - one over $3000. I've
little experience of 3-day auctions, but getting so many bids on the
first day of an auction looks a bit odd to me: is there some way these
can have been constructed by program, or are they genuine? I've found
an item ( 4376406818 ) where the seller has failed to flag it as a
private auction, so the bids can be seen - and on this they look real.
Sorry if you've heard all this before, but there are always new people
about.
John K.
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Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 14:37:03 -0500
From: "Gregg Bailey"
Subject: RE: [CB] PVC Contrabass Clarinet
Michael,
You don't have to call me Mr. Bailey--I'm a 23 year-old college
student (organ performance major).
I am delighted that you are interested in my PVC creation.
However, I live in Texas (I attend the University of North Texas in
Denton). I must point out that it was VERY easy to buy the
materials and assemble. You could easily do it yourself. I
would suggest only constructing half of it, because there really isn't
any power in the sound once I start connecting more than 8 of the 4'
sections. It would probably only cost you about $20. You
would just need to make sure you had the 10' sections cut as I
described in the article on contrabass.com.
You can assemble the thing very quickly; it takes virtually no time at
all. If you have any further questions about how to assemble it
based on what I did, feel free to ask. I will get a picture
online sometime, but it probably won't be anytime soon. It's
really very simple. If you understand what I said in the article
about "one cycle of construction" repeating over and over and the fact
that the result looks like a giant plastic radiator, you can see how
the construction is VERY simple. That's all I wanted this
"project" to be--just a simple way of producing various pitches by
adding or removing sections of PVC. There's really nothing to it
at all, but it's fun to hear those low notes! It's so simple to
put together that I highly recommend doing it yourself. Once you
get the PVC and elbows home, all you need is some grease for the
joints, and you can start producing these tones instantly just by
fitting various numbers of the sections together. Let me know if
you decide to do it yourself.
Really, it's so easy, you should. And again, if you have
any more questions, do feel free to ask. Oh, by the way, if you
DO decide to do this yourself, make sure the mouthpiece fits into 1
1/4" PVC. When I was in high school, I had access to one Selmer
BBb contra mouthpiece and one Leblanc BBb mouthpiece. Between the
two mouthpieces, only one of them would go into the PVC. However,
when I was at Baylor University for one year, I had access to the same
mouthpiece assortment, but the success of those two mouthpieces was
exactly backwards--the type that had been too large from the other
mouthpiece set DID fit, but the type that HAD fit from the previous
mouthpiece set was then too large. Weird. Don't worry about
the cork not fitting; it probably won't. For both of the
mouthpieces that fit, they would only fit down to just below the cork,
or maybe just a part of the cork. That's enough to get a decent
seal. I chose to use PVC that was large enough for the mouthpiece
to fit INTO rather than using a smaller diameter that the mouthpiece
could fit OVER because I figured that the experiment would be more
successful if the bore of the PVC were as large as possible. Let
me know if you do it yourself!
-Gregg
***End of Contrabass Digest***