Best gifts for clarinet players

Buy a Vandoren JUNO J5 mouthpiece for about forty-five dollars. If that is more than you want to spend, buy a box of ten reeds at strength 2.5 for about twenty-four, or the Yamaha care kit for about twenty. Those three cover almost every student clarinet player, and the first one is the only gift on this page that changes the sound coming out of the instrument.

A student clarinet is a reliable machine with two weak points, and neither of them is the body of the instrument. The first is the mouthpiece it was packaged with, which is made to a price and is where the sound is actually produced. The second is the moisture left inside it after every rehearsal, which is what kills pads. Everything here addresses one of those two, puts the instrument somewhere safe, or gives the player something to play. Specifications below are the makers’ and publisher’s own, cited at the bottom, and our method is published in full.

The mouthpiece is where the sound is made

Hand a struggling beginner a better clarinet and very little changes. Hand them a better mouthpiece and the squeaks, the airy low register and the notes that will not speak often improve the same afternoon. That is not magic: the mouthpiece and reed are the sound source, and the rest of the instrument is a tube that lengthens and shortens.

The piece bundled with a starter clarinet is built to a cost that leaves room for the clarinet. It usually works. It rarely works well, and the student has no way to know that the instrument is not the problem.

The standard recommendation here would be the Yamaha 4C, and on the day we built this page you could not buy one: all three Bb listings for it were showing no availability, with one marked currently unavailable outright. Rather than link a product nobody can purchase, the pick is Vandoren’s JUNO J5#ad, which Vandoren publishes as a mouthpiece designed specifically for beginners: a closed tip opening with a medium facing for easy response across the registers, O-rings in place of cork so the seal does not need greasing, and food-contact certified acrylic. It is made in France in the same factory as the rest of the range, and Vandoren states it pairs with the JUNO reeds a student is most likely to already be playing.

Two honest cautions. If the clarinet is rented, the shop usually owns the mouthpiece it supplied, and a replacement is a gift for the student rather than for the instrument. And a mouthpiece is personal: a player with a teacher may be moved onto something specific within a year or two. Neither makes it a bad gift this December.

Reeds, and the number everybody gets wrong

The second thing that makes a student sound worse than they play is the reed, and the mistake is almost always strength.

A reed that is too hard is physically harder to make speak. The player bites, the tone goes thin and pinched, the low register stops responding, and everybody concludes the student is not practicing. Strength 2.5 is the standard place for a student past the first few months; 2 is common in the first term, and 3 arrives later with a settled embouchure.

Which is why a box of ten JUNO 2.5s#ad is a genuinely good gift: reeds chip, warp and die, and a student rationing three of them plays worse every week. If you want to spend less, the Rico Organic three-pack#ad is the same idea in a smaller quantity. The whole argument about cut, strength and brand is on our best reeds for beginners page, and this page does not re-run it.

The companion purchase is the one students never make for themselves. A four-reed case#ad holds reeds flat while they dry, so they stay flat; reeds rattling loose in a case warp, and a warped reed seals badly against the mouthpiece. Sixteen dollars, and it makes the box of reeds last noticeably longer.

Moisture is what actually damages a clarinet

This site spends a lot of words on winter humidity, because December genuinely cracks wooden string instruments in heated rooms. A clarinet is the instrument where that advice does not transfer, and it is worth saying plainly.

Student clarinets — the Yamaha YCL-255 and its competitors — are ABS resin. Resin does not dry out and crack. What it does do is collect condensation in the bore every time the instrument is played, and that water sits under the pads, which are leather and cardboard. Pads swell, then leak, then need replacing, and pad work costs more than every gift on this page put together.

The fix is two minutes of swabbing after each session, and a student will do it if the swab is good and in the case. The Protec A125#ad is a microfiber swab that pulls through the body, the barrel and the mouthpiece — most starter swabs skip the mouthpiece, which is the part that gets the worst of it — and it is machine washable, which matters because the swab in a typical case is a damp rag by March.

The Yamaha care kit#ad is the broader version of the same gift: Yamaha’s own routine supplies, stated to work with any brand or model of clarinet, which means you do not need to know what the student plays. Buy one or the other; buying both duplicates some of the contents.

Something to play, and somewhere to put it down

The complaint from a first-year clarinet player in December is specific: relatives ask them to play something and the only music they own is a book of exercises.

Essential Elements Christmas Favorites for Bb clarinet#ad exists for that. Hal Leonard publishes it at level 0.5 to 1.5 — half a year to a year and a half of band — arranged by Michael Sweeney, with each song correlated to a specific page of the method book the school is already using, and playable either as a solo or with a full band. The song list is the modern Christmas canon rather than carols: Rudolph, Frosty, Jingle Bell Rock, Let It Snow, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. Ten dollars, and it is the only gift here they can use the evening they open it.

The last two picks are about what happens between sessions. A Hercules DS543BB stand#ad holds two flute or clarinet bodies plus a piccolo, folds to 8.1 inches and comes with a bag — and a clarinet on a stand is a clarinet nobody sits on. And a combined tuner and metronome#ad is the thing band directors ask for every September and no student owns. For a clarinet it must have a microphone: clip-on tuners read vibration through a solid body and a wind instrument gives them nothing to read. If home practice happens with the music propped on a bed, our music stands page covers the other half of that problem.

What we left off, and why

Ligatures. A good ligature is a real upgrade for a player with opinions, and the obvious candidate — the Rovner Dark 1R, the one most often recommended for students — showed no availability when we checked. The in-stock alternatives at this price are unbranded metal bands with no published material. A ligature is also the accessory most likely to duplicate something the student already has.

Upgrade barrels. A different barrel genuinely changes intonation and response, and it is a choice a player makes with a teacher, by trying several on their own instrument. Buying one blind is buying somebody a guess.

Unbranded pad-savers and cleaning kits at ten dollars. Widely sold, and the material is never published. A pad-saver with the wrong fiber content left inside the bore holds moisture against the pads, which is precisely the damage the swab is there to prevent.

Clarinet humidifiers. Marketed hard in December and aimed at wooden instruments. A student resin clarinet does not need one, and the page above explains why.

A step-up clarinet. The right move eventually, never a surprise: the grenadilla-versus-resin decision and the undercut-tone-hole question belong in a conversation with a teacher. Our beginner clarinets page covers what a student instrument should be, and step-up band instruments covers the year-two question across the section.

Buying for a different section? The same structure, with different products, is on gifts for flute players and gifts for saxophone players; if you do not know which instrument they play, gifts for band students starts there.