Playing the oboe isn’t easy.

Reedmaking isn’t always easy either. So how do you stay focused and know if you are really making progress, or just spinning your wheels?

It’s funny, because this is something I always notice in hindsight. Usually at the time in question, I either feel incredibly overworked or just plain discouraged. I feel like I am trying hard, but not getting anywhere.

It happened a lot more when I was a student, and now that I am in the “real world,” I actually look forward to it happening every so often, because then I know that my hard work is paying off.

So, what in the world am I talking about?

I am sure you have been there, but maybe you just didn’t recognize it at the time.

It’s that oboe audition you just don’t win, or that recital that just doesn’t go as well as you thought it would or should. It’s hard to get over those times when you feel like you are moving in “oboe reverse,” but those are the times you just have to pick yourself up and get going again. In fact, those are the times that give you the largest opportunity for growth and advancement.

The times that are toughest are actually pure gold. It is during those times that you are learning the most and making more progress than ever.

Now you can view those instances as depressing events, or you can see them as the ultimate springboard for moving your oboe playing to the next level.

I agree that the feeling of rejection or disappointment is not pleasant, and I definitely wouldn’t say I look forward to it, but I DO look forward to what comes after… getting grounded again, finding new things that are fun and exciting to work on and figuring out a way to solve the new challenges I have just faced.

It’s all a matter of perception, like so many things in life. When being an oboe player is all lemons, find a way to make lemonade.

One of the most common mistakes made by young oboists (and maybe old oboists too) is playing on oboe reeds that are just too heavy for that particular player.

I’ve been there, and I have certainly done that. And I saw many of my colleagues struggle with the same issue, especially when we were in school. It’s really easy to do when all you listen to is other oboists, day in and day out.

Somehow, you get in this mindset that the way to get that rich, luscious sound you covet is to play on oboe reeds that are too heavy for you! I don’t know the exact psychology behind that but it is something about thinking you need to go in the opposite direction of a really light-sounding oboe reed.

By steering clear of a light-sounding reed, you also give up light FEELING reeds and you end up with a 2 X 4, as my teacher would say. The worst part is that you think you sound great on it, because it is so “dark,” but the reality is that you most likely sound like you are working REALLY hard. Plus, no one can hear what you are trying to do musically.

If this sounds like you, read on!

You’ll never get that rich oboe sound that “so and so has” unless you are truly comfortable and at ease on your oboe reed. It’s just the way it works.

In fact, the reed might even feel “light” to you, but because you are so suited to it, you will have a range of colors not available to you before. Other oboists will be coveting YOUR amazing tone.

I still remember one amazing oboe reed I had a while back. I even remember that it was neon yellow and blue, and just amazing.

Without a thought, I was able to play the first movement of Bach’s solo flute partita, which, if you know it well, is just an entire page of non-stop articulated sixteenth notes.

I played it for a bunch of people and I was very surprised at their reaction. It’s a really hard piece in a lot of ways, and it was by no means perfect. But the reaction I got from other oboists (!!) was that it was seamlessly articulated, with a beautiful full tone in every register.

I was really stunned because I remember thinking my reed felt a little light… it HAD to be for me to be able to articulate every note.

So, the music REQUIRED me to have a reed I could really play, and the effect was more than I even intended or was aware of. That experience taught me this lesson:

Have an oboe reed you can play easily and confidently and your music-making (and the perception of your music-making) will go beyond what you even think is possible.

So what do you do if your reeds are too heavy?

Well, first identify the problem. Sure, if you are playing Mahler in an orchestra it isn’t going to be as obvious. But if you are prepping solo stuff, make sure your reed can indeed play easily in every register.

Don’t worry about how it sounds. If it isn’t easy enough for you to play without popping a blood vessel, you need to lighten it.

Making a reed lighter is not bad.

It’s largely just a stereotype. Anyway, start by thinning the tip, then maybe just go over the entire reed (without pressing!) and just get rid of some bulk. This will give you a good place to start.

Once you get used to playing on reeds you can actually play, you won’t settle for anything less.

Scraping an oboe reed blank is a little like creating a shell for the reed to live in. It isn’t really an oboe reed yet, but it has to be a good enough shell so that the reed can eventually take shape within it. It seems like a rather abstract idea now, so just remember… Your initial goal is to just get some cane off the reed.

All that hard shiny cane must go for the reed to vibrate. Although this part of oboe reed making is not very detailed, you will have to learn basic knife control to get the shiny cane off. Of course, practice makes perfect.

As your reed making skill improves, however, don’t let yourself get bogged down with this step. I have seen may experienced reed making students take such care and time with this part – the “getting the cane off” part. It is not necessary!

Eventually you want to get the rough cane off as quick and as easily as possible. Someone that knows nothing about oboe reed making could learn to do this efficiently and consistently with just a little practice.

Although you will probably end of finishing your reeds while they are wet, I like to scrape blanks (up until the point where I clip the tip) when they are pretty dry. That is just my preference because I don’t feel that the actual blank scraping is the detailed part.

Again, you are just making a reed shell right now. You will have to experiment with how hard you press when you are scraping. It isn’t something I can explain in words except to say you always want to use the least amount of pressure possible so that you don’t crack the cane.

Your right hand is just going to move the knife, it is your left hand that will anchor and apply pressure when you need it. You will figure many of these things out for yourself. Even a private reed making teacher wouldn’t be able to actually feel how much pressure you are using. And it is a totally individual thing anyway.

So take your blank and mark 68 mm. A finished reed will be about 69-70 mm, so I like to start scraping my tip at about 68. Don’t forget to keep that picture of each side of the oboe reed separated by the important spine.

With your knife, you are going to do at least 15 scrapes of the tip on each side of the spine. Start at the line you drew and let’s do the left side first. Draw your knife up and all the way to the very end of tip so that it goes off the end.

This is a very important habit to create.

You always want to scrape the tip and get used to going off the very end. Once you do about 15 scrapes on the left side of the tip, do the right side. Then turn the reed over and do the same exact thing on the flipside.

When you are done you will have rough scraped the tip of the oboe reed!

Now onto rough scraping the body of the reed.

We’re going to apply the same concept you used on the tip and scrape all the way from a few millimeters above the string up until the heart starts, probably about 65 mm. Again you are going to honor the spine, and when you are done with this part there will be a visible spine that you have made down the entire reed. Do about 10-12 of these scrapes on all 4 sides of the reed. You should have taken off a good deal of cane by now.

If you barely see any cane on your table, you are probably not pressing hard enough. These rough scrapes need to remove cane, not just caress it. There is no way a reed is going to vibrate if it has tons and tons of heavy cane on it.

Sometimes I am ready to clip at this point. But most of the time I go back to the tip and kind of repeat what I already did – 15 scrapes on each side of the spine and then again on the flipside.

Special Note

This article is a short excerpt from “The Beginner’s Guide to Making Your First Playing Oboe Reed… in 9 Days or Less”, a step-by-step guide to help you start your oboe reed making journey.

Running an oboe reed business and all, I often get requests or inquiries about reeds and the desired tone they’ll produce. And while I agree that reeds play an important part in determining your sound on a given day, I am old-fashioned and in favor of hard work to get the tone you want!!

I’ll always think of my teacher, Richard Killmer, who could take your most crude, unfinished reed and make it sound amazing.

So, what’s the secret?

The secret is that your tone is your voice, and it can be developed and matured like any other voice.

As oboists, we are always so quick to blame the reed, or let the reed become our personality.

But your tone is your personality, and it will come through in your playing pretty much no matter what you do. But there certainly are steps you can take to refine your voice and make it sound more like the ideal sound you hear in your head.

The hard work you have to do is long tones!!

Not just any long tones, but mindful long tones. That means that for 15-30 minutes a day you concentrate and listen and notice all the subtleties of your sound.

You’ll spend hours (although they’ll fly by) trying to stop and start a note just the way you want it, and hours more slurring up and down between notes to get that seamless buttery-ness that comes from you, and not your reed.

Plugging in a great reed will never do you justice if you haven’t spent time on identifying your voice and refining it. The best part about working in this way is the rewards you will see slowly, but consistently over time.

You’ll probably struggle daily with long tones for a while, have bouts of frustration…..and then finally it will happen!!

You might get to perform a Bach cantata, and you still feel like you are struggling. Someone gives you a recording, and although there is always stuff you’d like to do over, you notice a transformation of your sound!

It sounds effortless and liquid, just what you have been hearing in your ear for the last few months. Those moments make it all worth it because you have somehow transferred the voice you’ve had in your head to your oboe playing!

Just remember the rewards that you will reap from working hard to “find yourself” the next time you are in a reed slump. The reed is just the vehicle for a sound – your voice is what you make it.

When I was a student at Juilliard Pre-College, I was probably at the peak of my early learning about music and the oboe. I remember feeling continually challenged, and I could practice for hours on end.

My teacher was especially demanding, and I learned all kinds of things about the oboe, especially about oboe technique. It was at times excruciating to go through all of the Barrett book’s articulation studies… and that was before I would have to transpose them.

I was hard at work and loving it.

Finally, one day I was actually working on a real piece of oboe music. It had taken about 6 months to get to this point, and I remember it being more frustrating than anything. The piece was the Saint Saens Oboe Sonata, and I could not make it past the first few bars without a slew of comments and suggestions from my teacher.

It was a pivotal moment in my learning, (and in my life) when I became so frustrated about not being able to put all the pieces together well enough. There was the attack, the pitch, the blowing through all the notes – I felt like the technical demands were endless.

My teacher, in her calm and quiet way just stopped and looked at me. She knew I was frustrated and she knew why. I will always remember her advice to me:

When you think about the music, and not what you “have” to do or “should” be doing, the technique takes a back seat.

This was such important advice, and even more so coming from her. We spent so much time on the “right” way to do things that is was pretty easy to get overwhelmed. Hearing that I should and could be myself was the most liberating thing, because you will never be done learning.

There will always be that technical thing you could have done better, or that newer technique that you are trying to master at the same time you need to be preparing a recital. But no matter what, when push comes to shove, no one cares about anything except the music you are communicating.

So, even when you are playing an etude, you need to play it less like something you are learning and trying to be “good at” and more like a “gem of self-expression” (another oboe phrase my teacher liked to use).

Through the years, this mantra has served me well. When it comes time to play for real, nothing else matters except the music. Not your reed, or what you have to do to play it. Part of being an adaptable musician and a great oboe player is being able to produce in the worst of circumstances.

It is a refreshing thing to hear someone do this, because their personality and gifts as a musician shine through no matter what. So, keep practicing and perfecting. But when it counts, be able to get back to what really matters… and remember that music is an art and not a science.

Let it be known that I like band directors, and that without mine long ago I would not be sitting here writing about what I know about the oboe.

He was (and probably still is) a wonderful man who encouraged me, taught me what he knew but then was humble enough to say that he could take me no further. He recommended a professional oboist in town so I could continue learning the things he could not teach me, and I am forever grateful.

So, you could say I have a great deal of respect for band directors.

I know they are teaching a lot of kids a lot of different instruments, and there is no way anybody can be an expert on all of them. I give them credit for trying!

But there’s something that has been coming up a lot in my teaching and even when fielding reed questions that has been bothering me. And although I am sure band directors aren’t the only ones to “blame,” that’s where I am starting to work towards a solution.

The problem seems to be in advising the young band oboists in the selection of oboe reeds. Now, many a band director has bought handmade oboe reeds from me, so there are exceptions.

But to the majority out there, do you know how much easier teaching the oboe would be if you handed out handmade oboe reeds instead of fibercane or even those awful profiled music-store reeds?

The reason is plain and simple.

These reeds do not encourage good habits and make the oboe difficult to play, more difficult that it ever needs to be.

The idea I keep hearing is that somehow, good reeds are reserved for good students… but that is completely wrong. A good, handmade oboe reed should be provided for every beginning oboist on their very first day of playing the oboe.

Talk to a professional oboist and see if they can work with you in making reeds that young students can handle, or consult a professional reedmaking company (yes, like MKL Reeds) that can work with these requests.

Although we need “labels” on reeds so that we all know what we are talking about, these labels are perhaps the least helpful part of all of this. Find a place that can make reeds for beginning students, and that should be pretty much all you need to say.

I am on my soapbox lately about all this “hard, medium hard, soft” stuff!! There is also this very large misconception out there that once a student has been playing for more than a year they need to “graduate” to a “harder” reed… and by the time they have been playing a while they are being handed these “hard” reeds they can’t even play!

I just don’t understand where this all came from, thinking that increased ability on the oboe somehow means you should make it harder for someone to actually play.

Now, it’s not entirely the fault of a band director. And the situation is not exactly helped by machine made reed manufacturers that are labeling their reeds in this way either.

Here’s my take on it:

An oboist needs a reed he can play, NO EXCEPTIONS!!

Buy oboe reeds for your students that are handmade and are not classified in this hard, medium, soft way, unless you can talk to someone and explain what you need.

What a more advanced student needs in a reed is resistance, which is much different that hardness. So, stop handing them hard reeds once they pass the year mark, and especially when they seem like they are struggling.

Unless you can scrape these reeds down for them, they should not be encouraged. Better yet, get reeds from a professional oboist because these will make your job easier and it will make your students improve faster and probably enjoy playing a lot more.

I can’t imagine how hard a job it is to be in your shoes, but think of the amazing start you can help give to each and every kid that chooses to play the oboe.

There are many excuses for not making your own oboe reeds, but in my opinion, one of the poorest excuses is money.

Let’s face it, playing the oboe is an expensive proposition. If you haven’t realized it already, then let this be your warning. If you don’t want to spend any money at all, then you should probably just pick another instrument.

Apart from getting the oboe itself, there is regular maintenance, and of course buying reeds. Which brings me to the issue of it “costing too much” to make reeds. Learning to make reeds is an investment, and like any investment, you have to put something in to get something out. In this case, that means a bit of money.

But the rewards of making your own reeds go beyond money (even though you will spend less doing so!).

If your true goal is to really improve and take your oboe playing to the next level, then you have to be willing to accept the price tag and just go toward your goals. There is nothing that will improve your tone, music-making and “artistry” like learning to make and play on your own oboe reeds.

You can’t really put a price tag on that, because the skill is simply invaluable.

Of course you’ll have to invest in some basic reedmaking tools, but more importantly you will have to find some way to learn what you are doing.

This knowledge is also priceless because the reedmaking foundation that you lay will help determine your reedmaking success.

You can find a professional teacher to take lessons from, or you can learn the basics from an online or published guide. Buying a few tools and getting a beginning reedmaking education are the two “up front” costs you’ll need to incur to get going on making your own reeds.

You can do all of this for relatively little money, compared to the money you will spend buying store-bought oboe reeds year after year. The education you will get is priceless, because you will determine so much about your own oboe playing.

Don’t let money excuses hold you back from exploring this wonderful part of being an oboe player! In the long run, you’ll actually save money and you will be a better oboe player as well.

After you take the jump to making your own oboe reeds, I guarantee you will not look back and regret it at all. The money, especially, will seem inconsequential when you never have to pick up the phone to order reeds again!

Question

“How do I know what my oboe reed strength is?”

Answer

I never bought into the whole reed strength phenomenon, so I don’t know what to tell you. Make your own and it won’t matter. If you have to buy a “strength” just remember that harder doesn’t mean that you or the reed is “better” or more advanced than you used to be. It will simply have more wood left on it, hence less finished.

Question

I’m a student and I will have my exam recital this May. The program has to contain a modern/contemporary piece (my teacher claims Poulenc and Britten do not fall into that category, they are too old). So, I’m out of ideas!

I would like to find an interesting/cool/beautiful piece and not strange just for the sake of being strange, also one that I can have a chance to play good by May. Since I’m playing another solo piece on the concert, it would be good if the piece was not solo too. I really have no clue about contemporary oboe repertoire, so I would be grateful for any tip.

Answer

Paul Reade has some great oboe music. One of my favorite all-time oboe pieces is his “Suite from Jane Eyre”. You can hear a snippet of it here:

Suite from Jane Eyre by Paul Reade (Live Performance, Rochester NY)

On the total other side of the spectrum is a piece called “Obsession” by Shinohara.

Twas The Day of the Concert

Twas the day of the concert when all through Sue’s house,
the sound of her reed making was waking her spouse. And the
noise from her scraping and clipping and crowing, was
causing the pain in his head to keep growing.

He said, “Don’t you think you could stop for a minute? I
keep having this dream and your reed tools are in it. The
knife keeps on yelling it’s taken for granted, the cane
tells old stories ’bout the day it was planted.”

“What more can you do at this point but pray? The concert is
only a few hours away. I’m sorry I destroyed them – I know I
didn’t listen, I didn’t think I had to ask for permission.”

“You said, ‘Get my swab.’ so I went in to look, I don’t know
for sure why I tripped on the book. It happened so quickly -
at such a fast pace, but as soon as I’d fallen, I felt your
reed case.”

“It made quite a mark in the small of my back, put a hole
through my sweater – threw my neck out of whack. I know that
your reeds are your major concern, but please rest assured
that my lesson’s been learned.”

“How many were in there? Oh, 20 you say? Well can’t you just
buy some? Wouldn’t that help in some way?” “Are you
kidding?” said Sue, “Do you think it’s that easy?” “I just
snap my two fingers and reeds come to meet me?”

The anger inside of Sue kept on growing, It got to her face
and soon she was glowing. Her lips became taut and her eyes
became small, she gazed at her husband who backed to the
wall.

“I know I need patience, in times such as these, it won’t do
me good to just panic and freeze. I do really love you,” she
said with some force, “but smashing a reed case is grounds
for divorce.”

“Just give me some time and the space that I need, to calm
down a bit and make some new reeds. I thrive under pressure,
when my back’s to the wall, I’ll play my big solo, the one
from “Amahl.”

Sue’s anger, it turns out, was too much to bear, “This
shouldn’t be happening, it just isn’t fair!” She tried to
breathe deeply, she tried to hold back, but each reed she
scraped just died with a crack.

When what to Sue’s wondering ears should appear, the voice
of her husband: “Mail’s finally here!” What he said next was
a total surprise, “For you,” he said softly with love in his
eyes.

Sue opened the package in near record time, she had a strong
hunch that she knew what she’d find. Lined up in 2 rows in
the box full of foam, were 10 brand new reeds that needed a
home.

She took one and tried it – she was so blown away. It was
just what she needed, they’d sure save the day. She emptied
the box and then found a short note, one that the owner of
the reed company wrote.

It said Dear Ms. Johnson, Tim called us and said, he needed
reeds quickly or he’d soon be dead. Rather than hear that he
suffered that fate, we did try our best to make sure they
weren’t late.

I’m glad we could help in your hour of need, the note was
signed Maryn – from MKL REEDS.

Sue looked at the note as it hung on her wall, she dreamed
of playing her part from “Amahl.” So off to the concert she
ran with her oboe, to try her new reeds and to play her big
solo.

©2010 MKL Reeds – www.mklreeds.com. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted from The Night Before Christmas by C. Clement Moore