Uebel Zenit Bb/A Clarinet - Grenadilla

The Zenit is one of two top-of-the-line clarinets Uebel makes — the Vision is the other. A gor-ge-ous, fluid sound that just wraps around you. (I was going to say, "like a nice bourbon" but there are probably some kids reading. Kids, ignore this parenthetical statement.) Butter. The Grenadilla version is perfect for that huge hall you're going to play in—watch out Gershwin, this clarinet has you in its sights. It's also perfect for that club you're playing in after that huge hall. Watch out Buddy DiFranco.

Uebel redesigned the bore and the tone holes on this model, and they say it's for better intonation and response across the registers. Before we talk about the way the Zenit plays, let's talk about some of the less-necessary-but-posh details: the inlay, the metal filigree on the tenon rings...and the CASE. This comes with the leather case cover by an Italian fashion company that rhymes with "Nada." Inside that leather cover is a cute pochette case. The A clarinet comes in a double case with both the cover and a larger pochette. Ok, moving on to...

How it plays

Here's the first thing I noticed: it holds pitch when you push. Free-blowing clarinets usually drift flat as you add air — the Rêve moves a lot, and it's only a notch more open than this. The Zenit barely moves from soft to loud, which puts it in the top handful of everything I've analyzed. That's the biggest headline for this horn: free-blowing doesn't have to cost you pitch.

Sound sits just on the dark side of the middle of my catalog. Scale and twelfths both land in the upper half, better than most of what I carry but not the best (also quite possibly an artifact of me playing an open mouthpiece on a free-blowing clarinet) — the throat tones and upper chalumeau run flat, same as nearly every clarinet in my catalog, and there's one twelfth in the middle of the horn that comes out narrow. The dashboard below shows you where all of it lives.

Resistance: 5/10, Medium

Right in the middle. Air goes in without any argument and the horn responds fast, but there's enough back-pressure that you're not holding the sound together all by yourself. 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

You're probably also looking at the Vision — darker than the Zenit with a slightly better chromatic scale, though its twelfths don't line up quite as well. The Selmer Muse is almost identical to the Zenit in brightness and has the best twelfths of anything I've measured. And the Backun Lumière in grenadilla is brighter, with a more accurate chromatic scale and better twelfths than the Zenit; it pushes back a bit more than the Zenit does if you want that constraint (and many do!). All of these options have full recordings and dashboard data, so you can A/B them from your couch before you order anything.