Evaluating Your Reeds
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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