Peder / The Pedler

Many thanks to Jeffrey Girsch for giving me the opportunity to review this clarinet. Jeffrey has sent me bunches of clarinets. His school system is so blessed to have him as a band booster.

This one was interesting to me! The chromatic ring finger right hand key goes over the ring key instead of under it. This doesn’t have the special features viewed on the right hand of some of the other Pedler wooden clarinets. The trill keys all have separate posts and are made seriously strong. They keys are silver plated. All the keys having long pivot rods in them are longer than normal.

This clarinet shows signs of being very like the ‘The Pedler’ hard rubber clarinet. Both are wide bore. The key work would have been similar, except I cut off a lot of the keys on the hard rubber one. The hard rubber one had chrome plated keys. I conclude that the ‘The Pedler’ wooden instrument would have been intended as an upper level student model. The right hand chromatic b-natural key that goes over the top on this model, goes under as normal on the hard rubber clarinet.

I took the name ‘Pedler’ as my nom de clarinet when I first started clarinetpages. This was just because I had just worked on the Pedler unibody at that time. It wasn't because Pedler clarinets are particularly good. However, because I identified myself with that name, I try my best when reconditioning Pedler clarinets. Alas! This one disappointed me in how it plays.