Uebel Rêve Bb/A Clarinet - Mopane

The Uebel Rêve felt immediately comfortable — familiar — when I tried all of Uebel's clarinets. I love the ease of blowing and the absolutely humongous sound of this super-responsive clarinet. Seriously, this clarinet rocks. If you're coming from a Buffet Festival or R13 Prestige, a Selmer Signature or Privilege, I think the Rêve will feel very comfortable to you, too.

With its brand new bore—appropriately named the "Rêve" bore—the instrument projects like a mofo. If you're wondering, the Mopane version has a bigger, less compact sound than the Grenadilla version, but both can fill a room, a hall—and probably a stadium if you've got those kind of gigs.

Here's the simplest thing I can tell you: of every clarinet I carry in its price range (including the R13), the Rêve is my favorite. It costs less than most of what's in our catalog and I'd put its playing qualities up against horns well above it.

How it plays

The Rêve has a delightfully light, crisp, very "French" sound, and the registers line up — its twelfths are in the top third of all instruments we carry.

This is a free-blowing clarinet, so naturally, tuning becomes more your responsibility. With my open mouthpiece (a BD6 HD) I’m not doing myself any favors in the dashboard below, because an open mouthpiece and a free blowing clarinet make this instrument pretty hard to control. As a result, pitch fluctuations are exaggerated, so if I were going to play the Rêve regularly, I'd choose something a little more resistant like a 5RV or Fobes CF. 

Resistance: 4/10, Medium-Light

There's not much back-pressure here — the Rêve takes as much air as you feed it, and it keeps accepting more when you push instead of resisting you. Wonderful for players who have their fundamentals nailed, like embouchure and voicing. Hear how it responds to volume in the audio player below — Weber first (wide dynamics, wide color), then the Berlioz (wide dynamics, narrow color), then the Gershwin (narrow on both).

Before you decide

If you're cross-shopping in this price range, play or listen to these three: the Buffet R13 is the horn everyone knows — a bit darker and more resistant than the Rêve Mopane. The Selmer Présence is nearly as free-blowing and darker still, and gives you a huge color range in exchange for losing a bit of stability as you add air/volume (again: mouthpiece mismatch). And the Royal Polaris is the full opposite: a much darker sound than any of the above with a chromatic scale that's better than the Rêve's. Every one of them has full recordings and a dashboard on its page, so you can A/B them from your couch before you ever order one.

But if you want one of the brightest, biggest-sounding free-blowers in the shop, you found it.