Klarinet Archive - Posting 000448.txt from 2000/04

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Adjusting reeds
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 05:03:27 -0400

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000 10:57:32 +0800, vahalakv@-----.au said:

> Tony Pay wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 10 Apr 2000 20:57:18 -0400, kkrelove@-----.com said:
> >
> > > > Oh, one other thing: you can *split* the reed, once or more
> > > > times, at the tip, down about half a centimetre or so. I tried
> > > > this about 10 years ago for a few months, but find that I use it
> > > > relatively rarely now. (There used to be a gadget that did it
> > > > for you.) It can help with some reeds.
> > > >
> > >
> > > What does this do to the sound or the response?
> >
> > It made them, er, *better*:-)
> >
> > Tony
>
> Tony, Can you describe how you do the splitting - do you produce two
> thinner adjacent wafers, or do you make "cuts" across the width of the
> reed?
>
> Thanks, Karel.

All this was intended to be a little bit tongue-in-cheek, though
certainly there was such a device on sale for a bit.

You could make either one or three small incisions, the first being in
the middle of the reed and the other, optional two on either side of,
and parallel to the first. If you made one incision you separated the
right from the left side of the reed a small distance down from the tip,
and if you made three incisions you divided the breadth of the reed into
four 'wafers', as you called them.

As I recall, the incisions to right and left of the central incision
were slightly shorter than the half-centimetre I talked about.

The incisions were made with wafer-thin blades, and amounted to a
separation of the fibres rather than anything more drastic. A
safety-razor blade is the right sort of tool, though perhaps you don't
have such things in the US anymore.

I suppose the 'half-baked explanation' of the procedure might have been
that it allows one side of the reed the freedom to vibrate a bit
independently of the other, which could be imagined to break up any
unwanted torsional vibration of the reed in its entirety. But I'm just
making that up.

In a way, I'm sorry I mentioned it, because it's a bit gimmicky, and
might spark off a worldwide epidemic of mangled reeds if we're not
careful. You're probably better off making sure the response of one
side of the reed is comparable to the response of the other, something
that I probably should have said in my original post. You can check
that either by rotating the mouthpiece in your mouth as you blow, or by
mounting the reed slightly to one side or the other.

In fact, just mounting the reed slightly to one side or the other on the
mouthpiece can often improve it a great deal, and it's something that
many students don't think of trying seriously. After all, it's a
reversible change, unlike anything you do with a knife....

And if it disturbs your sense of elegance to have your reed skew-whiff
on your mouthpiece, recall that Amati violins are quite 'crudely' made.

Vibrational elegance doesn't necessarily correspond to physical
elegance. (As the archbishop said to the actress.)

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE www.gmn.com/artists/welcome.asp
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