Since my clarinet model had a bad reputation online, I became somewhat unhappy with it for no other reason than people told me it wasn’t good enough. I started to do a bunch of research into clarinet brands and how to upgrade your clarinet.
In the end, I decided that upgrading my own clarinet was the way to go. More specifically, I would buy a new mouthpiece (my mouthpiece was a little bit chipped, anyways).
The forums told me that most of the sound comes out of the mouthpiece, and those are much cheaper to replace than the whole thing.
After spending hours on YouTube listening to what different mouthpieces sounded like, I was swayed by the new Rico Reserve mouthpieces. They are machine made, which means they are cheaper. All the reviews I read about these mouthpieces were really good and said that these mouthpieces stood up to the
hand-made professional ones, so I decided to give them a shot.
I ended up buying the most closed-tipped size they had because I liked that sound the most. On the dark-bright scale people like to talk about, closed-tipped = darker sound (I like to think of it as a spooky, owl-like sound) and with a harder reed. Open-tipped = brighter and jazzier with a softer, more flexible reed.
Once my new mouthpiece arrived, I found that I sounded a lot better. This was still very early on in my reintroduction to the clarinet, so I still had a long way to go in terms of sounding 
good. Now, though, I felt much more confident in my instrument set up and was more committed to learning how to play well since I had put some money into it. I think that doing all the research that I did also made me more excited about the clarinet. Before, I just thought of my clarinet as this dorky instrument I was stuck with because that was the instrument my brother had chosen to play years ago. After figuring out what kind of sounds I liked from the clarinet and hearing the range of styles it could play, it became an instrument I wanted to become good at.
Squeaky Clarinet 