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 start defining the sections of the reed, you will start the evaluation process.
While evaluating the reed, you will be aiming for a balance between all the components of the reed.
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A Word About Balance Every reedmaker would agree that you need balance in a reed, no matter how you scrape or what type of reed you are making. Both sides of each blade must be symmetrically scraped. The 2 blades must also have the same amount of wood taken from the same places to help make the reed balanced. |
When you try your reeds while making them, really PLAY them. Play some music, see how they work in a real musical situation. Try doing things that reeds can often inhibit, such as in-tuned octaves, low note attacks, and soft downward slurs. It is surprising how a reed you thought felt pretty good for a few warm-up notes can be impossible to actually PLAY. Finding this out in your studio is far less painful than finding out 5 minutes into
a rehearsal, so put your reeds to the test before you go out in public.
A final thought on reed evaluation:
Don't sacrifice your comfort and ability to play the oboe for a reed you
think sounds good"but is difficult to play. If you have to struggle to
get the reed to work, you won't be able to play music.
Your reed should allow you to play. It should be on your side and not limit your playing. At the same time, you need to play the reed. Match its resistance. You need to be able to play your reed. It may sound good to you,
but it won't to everybody else if you aren't comfortable playing it.
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How do you know if you'll like an oboe reed before you play it? You can't. When the rubber finally hits the road, it hardly matters if the reed is a great one, perfectly customized to your every desire, if it just plain doesn't work well for you. 
My name is Maryn Leister. I am a graduate of the Juilliard Pre-College Division and the Eastman School of Music, where I was a student of Richard Killmer. After graduating from college, I lived in Nashville, TN, then headed to Knoxville, TN, New York City, and finally Chicago...
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I have a small question about the function of reeds. I've been studying with my current teacher for a while now and I've developed what I perceived to be a pretty good concept of how a reed should function. Recently, I had a lesson with Humbert Lucarelli, and he told me that my concept was totally wrong and that I should make my reeds with a very small shadow tip/hardly an angle, and that it should be very resistant so that I used little/no embouchure at all with my reeds and only produce through my diaphragm. I'm just curious if you keep your reeds very resistant or if you have them eased and shaped with your embouchure, as well as if you have any insight into that aspect of the function of reeds.