Amati ACL354S-O - C Clarinet

excellent quality, good price

This is a really lovely C Clarinet, such a wonderful sweet sound, can also be dark with a different mouthpiece and reed set up. Throat notes don't go so weak either. Even tone, good tuning and beautiful keywork. I bought it to save transposing with friends with guitars, melodians etc. a bit of Folk, Pop maybe Church, but I'm sure it could play any genre well. I tried the E11 but this Amati is much better, I'm developing a real fondness for it.

This is a fantastic instrument for the money. I got it having first tried the Buffet E11, bearing in mind that Buffet have experience of making C clarinets right up to the Prestige level. But actually the Amati is in a different league from the E11, even at close to half the price. The build quality is excellent: keywork action is smooth and nicely silver plated. The wood of the main body looks nice; although the bell is cocobolo (stained black). Anyway, the main point is that tuning is really not bad. Generally things are close to A=440 throughout, right up through the altissimo (although there's a short tuning barrel if you want 442). A hole bored in the bell raises the pitch of E/B, which are often very flat (they still are, but only slightly). There were a few odd notes that were quite sharp (such as throat Gsharp), but a little filler in the relevant holes easily tweaked those. About the only remaining problem was a flat altissmo F, but there are plenty of alternative fingerings for that. So in the end, I felt I had an instrument that was better in tune even than quality C clarinets that I've played, such as the Noblet, and very much better than the E11. You could splash out 5 times the price for a top professional C, but otherwise this Amati seems a great choice. I would add that Dawkes give a wonderful service in terms of sending out such instruments on trial (and, more importantly, efficiently reclaiming the ones you don't want).