 The Fingering Forum
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Author: sÖmeone
Date: 2003-02-02 07:51
what are your opinions on good oboe reeds?
what characteristics should they have?
how thin or how thick should it be?
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Author: TorusTubarius
Date: 2003-02-02 16:14
Well reeds vary so much from country to country it's really difficult to answer that for everyone. I have no idea what your reeds are like in Malaysia, so I'll just tell you about American scrape reeds.
<i>What are your opinions on good oboe reeds?</i>
Well, they rock. It's always nice to have a good reed; I actually have several right now believe it or not. I think a lot of people have the tendancy to "save" good reeds for special occasions. My opinion on this is rather divided. On the one hand, I can sympathize because I know how much it sucks to try and play a concert on a bad reed. However on the other hand, it's good to play as much as you can as often as you can on a good reed because that's the only way you'll ever know what a good reed is really capable of. How can you strive to make good reeds if you don't know what a good reed feels like? Plus, reeds change with the weather, and a lot of the time a reed that is good going into the box will come out a lot worse anyway; so you might as well go ahead and play on it.
<i>What characteristics should they have?</i>
Well here in America a good reed should crow at least two octaves of at least a "C", sometimes a little higher. A good reed has rails and a spine. The reeds should be around 70mm long, and the scraped area is divided into three sections: the tip, the heart, and the windows. The tip is usually around 3.5mm, the heart around 6.5mm, and the windows around 10mm for a total of 20mm length of scrape on the reed. This will probably be very different from reeds you have in Malaysia I would imagine.
If the reed is up to pitch, I first and foremost I look for <i>response</i>. Then you should make sure the reed has good pitch stability, a deep resonant tone, and a wide dynamic range. Now of course, this is the <i>ideal</i> reed I'm talking about. In reality, no reed is perfect, and it's up to the player to "fill in the gaps" so to speak and cover up any deficiencies a reed may have. I therefore think it's very important to learn to play on lots of different types of reeds, for better or worse.
<i>How thin or how thick should it be?</i>
This is really a matter of personal preference, and how hard your cane is. All pieces of cane are not created equal. I've been using Rigotti cane a lot recently that is just ridiculously hard, so the reeds I make out it are a good bit thinner than reeds made out of other cane. A reed that is too thick will be slow to respond, have a limited dynamic range, often stay too open, and will have a rough, coarse sounding tone. Conversely a reed that is too thin will have a shallow tone, will tend to close up, also have a limited dynamic range, and will just feel wimpy and offer none of that resistance which is so critical to oboe playing.
With American scrape reeds, the thickness of the three areas usually ends up being roughly a proportion of 1:3:2, meaning that if 1 is the thinnest and 3 is the thickest, the tip is 1, the heart is 3, and the windows are 2.
A really hard reed tends to last longer than a reed that is scraped really thin. I don't really have any numbers to tell you exactly how thick or thin since like I said it depends on the cane.
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