It’s always fun to travel to festivals and gigs out of town, but it can make for unpredictable reeds. Planning ahead for multiple scenarios with a case full of gorgeous reeds is the ideal situation, but how realistic is it to make a reed in one city and expect it to be the same somewhere else? I’m back in Chicago now after spending 5 days in Nashville and am headed to Northern Wisconsin next week for the Midsummer Music Festival. My traveling reed plan for a week away is usually to leave with about 6 blanks, a few rough-scraped reeds, and a couple cushy old reeds (the old reeds give me some wiggle room to have a selection of reeds to play for a day or two while I make up a batch of reeds (around 5 or 6) when I arrive. You can never fully plan for what you’ll encounter in a new place, but I’ve found that traveling with a selection of new and old reeds and blanks to work with keeps my options open!