Dear Holz - Friends,

I thank you for your interest and I will look forward to put some comments in English in our catalog for the next update. so it will make it easier to understand for you. If You have any questions about instruments or about what we are doing here, please feel free to ask. Also I can send some information including catalog by mail.

Personally I am a clarinet-player.  I studied the instrument here in Berlin at the "Hochschule der Kunste-Berlin". My Teacher was Ernst Kindermann, Solo-Clarinet of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. This was in the former West Berlin. During my longtime in the woodwind-business I got into contact to many instrument-makers and many professional musicians. All these contacts and knowledge I put in this shop to satisfy the demand of the musician,equal if she or he is amateur or professional. I try to keep a large stock of good second-hand instruments, new instruments, accessories and sheet music. In our repair section we have one "Meister" and four skilled craftsmen, everyone of them especiallised in his instrument: Clarinets, Flutes, Oboes, Bassoon, Saxophones. Repair, overhaul, special tuning, they help to solve every problem and to make instrument-playing more easy.

The German-System-Clarinet with the final mechanical changes invented by O.OEHLER is still the instrument of Chamber- and Orchestra-Music in Germany. It follows  with its construction purely the imagination of sound, classical and romantic composers wanted to hear during the performance of their works composed for the clarinet. Especially the smaller size of mouthpiece and the fork-fingerings of specific notes give an identical colour impossible to produce with a modern Boehm-clarinet.

The production of the German-system-clarinet has been always a Family-tradition. That means the specific model developped in the Family-workshop went from Grandfather to Father to son....

All the instrument in one Family are similar but all the models of different Workshop-Families, for example F.A.-UEBEL or O.NEIDHARDT are quite different from each other. Size of the bore, position of tonholes design of mechanism (all handmade on old instruments) gives to the different models an individual response sound characteristic and hand-feeling. So, You can for example feel very good playing an old Fritz Wurlitzer-clarinet but You feel unconfortable on an F.A.UEBEL-clarinet. The differences in the models result in the ideas of
the instrumentmaker and the clarinet-player who works together with him. So, very often a clarinet-modell represents the specific style of the musicians theese instruments have been made for.

Vienna-style of clarinet-playing is much different from Berlin-style. Today`s clarinets come allways closer in style. Sometimes it is hard to
decide whether the player is French, Japanese, American.... But still there are differences and the differences are quite bigger by elder players, playing on older instruments.

I had the pleasure to give some old instruments to Your "HOLZ-FRIENDS" and I am glad that the instruments deliverd to them are to their full satisfaction. Because of the far distance it is was impossible to try the instrument before they decided to buy . I look for a solution to find a way to make it possible to test the instrument before and probably You can help me for this.
If You have any question about instruments, please feel free to call me.

Sincerely Yours, "DIE HOLZBLASER" Thomas Reichle