A cou­ple of months ago, I wrote about going to Min­neapo­lis to try out new bas­soons. I brought two back with me for longer trial peri­ods. Both were great instru­ments, and I had a tough time decid­ing which I liked bet­ter. After a lot of back-and-forth (and an exten­sion of my trial period), I picked one — a Püch­ner 5000C. It has a beau­ti­ful tone, and is much more respon­sive and pro­ject­ing than my old Fox. The fin­ish, which they call “Alta Welt” (“Old World”), is gor­geous. In addi­tion to the stan­dard keys, it’s got an A-flat/B-flat trill key and a D/E-flat trill key. It has a whis­per key lock for each thumb, and a whole bunch of rollers. Prob­a­bly the coolest thing is that the instru­ment is a com­pact model, what some com­pa­nies call the “Gentleman’s Cut.” That is, the bass joint and the bell are split in a dif­fer­ent place from on a stan­dard bas­soon. The bass joint is only as long as the wing joint — a dif­fer­ence of five or six inches. What this means is that you can use a case that’s five or six inches shorter than your stan­dard one. The instru­ment came with a case that I didn’t really like, but Püch­ner agreed to take it back, so Mid­west Musi­cal Imports gave me a siz­able dis­count. Using some of that dis­count, I bought a really nice case by Brazil­ian maker Mar­cus Bonna. It’s so com­pact that peo­ple tell me it looks like a dou­ble clar­inet case. Any­way, here are a few dig­i­tal pics I took yes­ter­day of my new bas­soon. Click any of them to go to a gallery with more pics.