Evaluating Your Reeds No matter how you do your initial scrapes, every reed goes through a period of evaluation and refining scrapes based on crow, appearance, and overall characteristics. Hopefully, you have a gouge and shape that suit your individual needs and work well together, you've got a well formed blank, and you've started to form the overall slope of the reed. Now, as you take the reed down and…
Just got back from taking the kids to “Out of Africa…” It’s a zoo/safari hidden in the middle of nowhere in Cottonwood AZ. I have to admit, I’ve been to a lot of zoos and THIS left them all in the dust. I saw more animals (lemur, lions, leopards, rhinos, bear, and more) in a two hour period than I’ve seen in my entire life. It might sound funny, but…
Play the music, not the instrument. – Author Unknown Boy how true… especially for us oboe players who spend so much time trying to get along with such a finicky instrument. How often have you spent more time trying to play the oboe than you have trying to play the music through the oboe? I know I’ve done it many times. And it’s always somewhat comforting to remember what’s really…
“We’re swallowed up only when we are willing for it to happen.” -Nathalie Sarraute The beginning of the school year is often the beginning of the work year as well for many oboists. For the last few months, you may have had an outdoor concert or two, but nothing too serious. Now the phone is ringing off the hook with wedding jobs, teaching jobs, playing jobs, adjudicating jobs. All at…
When you’re looking for a good reed to play a solo performance, just remember this: Make sure you can play the reed out of your ear. That means the reed should be easy enough to get through your piece 2 or 3 times in a row without getting tired. So if your reed has you huffing and puffing after a bar or two, you’re going to get into hot water.…
“Fear has a smell, as love does.” -Margaret Atwood- I think the appropriate adaptation of this quote for oboists is “fear has a sound.” It does not matter how much you practice or how good or bad you think your reed is. Fear is obvious, and it is a sound that has no place in music. My very wise teacher had a saying along the same lines that I will…
It’s amazing what 4,000 feet will do to an oboe reed. 30 days ago, we moved out of the mountains of Flagstaff Arizona. Flagstaff Elevation: 7,200 feet above sea level. Now when you’re an oboe reed company, that type of elevation can be a real deal breaker. It was for us. So we stopped selling oboe reeds. We’d make them at the top of the mountain in Flagstaff, and then…
Who painted this picture of virtuoso oboist Johann Christian Fischer?
I remember this reed lesson pretty well. Even though it happened almost 15 years ago (eekkk…). The idea was to give myself a simple “cheat sheet” that I could refer back to as I made reeds. It was basically my profile of the “perfect reed.” I created a quick list of the major things I was looking for in a good reed. Mind you, this was 1993… so I was…
Here’s a page from my Oboe Notebook (one of them) back from a Masterclass I took with Richard Woodhams. It’s funny to look back at old things like this. It makes you realize how far you’ve come… and gives you the encouragement you need to go even farther. Take a look at the page, it’s still good advice from a master. To see the large version (that you can read),…