Klarinet Archive - Posting 000802.txt from 1998/03

From: "Karl Krelove" <kkrelove@-----.com>
Subj: Re: Mould on reeds
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 1998 11:43:50 -0500

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh-Boy <joshcole@-----.Edu>
Date: Thursday, March 12, 1998 9:32 PM
Subject: Re: Mould on reeds

>On Thu, 12 Mar 1998, Stephen J Frederick wrote:
>
>> I found that you dont need bleech to get rid of the mold, because this
>> often occurs with my reeds. what i found you could is get a piece of sand
>> paper and rub it over the read gently until the mold comes off.
>
>I'm not a biologist or anything, so I'm probably setting myself up for
>this -- but, um, doesn't mold grow into the reed and not just on? I
>remember seeing a magnified photograph of bread mold way back in junior
>high, and I could have sworn it had extensions growing into the bread for
>purposes of nutrition. In which case, sanding really wouldn't get rid of
>the mold, right? It's kind of like hacking away at weeds -- you can
>"kill" the weeds as many times as you want, but until the roots are dead,
>the weeds stay and grow. Let me know if I'm way off track (and I know you
>all will!!!) -- if I'm right (which has a probability of about 1 in a few
>billion of happening!! ;-) ), then I think the 10% bleach solution will
>work best. Besides, I always mess up sanding my reeds anyway, so sanding
>the part of the reed I play on would cause bad things to happen!!
>
>Joshua M. Coleman

I've missed a bunch of messages on this thread - I've been skipping them for
lack of time - and I just happened to catch this one. As I remember, the
original question had to do with someone (I think in Australia?) whose
student had suddenly found all (or most) of her reeds becoming consistently
moldy. Wasn't one reed or an occasional inconvenience. She needed to know
the cause in order to get the mold to stop happening. Trying to salvage an
already mold-ridden reed seems like a lost cause no matter how you try to do
it. If it played well before scraping, the sandpaper method will ruin the
balance or make the whole reed too thin. Chemicals strong enough to kill the
mold will also damage the wood fibers and probably ruin the reed's playing
characteristics. Clarinet reeds aren't that expensive - it seems as though
it isn't worth the effort to save an occasional reed that gets mold on (in)
it. Then there's the health concern if you don't eliminate the mold
completely.

Karl Krelove