Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2017-08-06 08:27
Ms. Zukovsky:
Not that I am by any means this board's official greeter, but please allow me to welcome you and wish you nothing but the best and healthiest retirement from a legendary performance career.
Your new found time has rekindled an interest you have had in making reeds that your schedule up until now didn't provide.
Buy the tools, experience the process, have great success or at least fun, learn something, share it with us.
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But with that said, allow me to share something with the rest of us, and it starts with a simple completely unrelated question: why do we have currency--you know money?
Well, as most people know, if not truly appreciate, back before governments issued the stuff and the populous recognized it as representing value, back before gold, we'd exchange goods rather than money with others. People had to be more "jacks of all trades" than master of a few and make the things they needed because it wasn't always easy to buy things in markets, so you had to make more things yourself.
With money, even gold, people could start specializing in certain goods and services, becoming more proficient at making them than if they had to spend their time making many of the things they need. They could sell the products for money, and use it to buy things they weren't as good at making from other specialists. So emerged the Village tailor, the blacksmith, the farmer, etc.
And if the "bread maker" needed meats and the "meat maker" needed metal, the "bread maker" didn't have to first buy metal with his bread to get meats.
And resultingly, the world became a better place because free trade makes each side richer, ergo anything that facilitates trade is good, all while the quality of goods rose while the cost to make and sell them dropped from specializing and economies of scale.
With the emergence of the industrial age, the idea of running your own vulcanization plant to make tires, over buying them from a tire maker became absurd.
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And yet, I can't help think that some of us (not all, not the hobbyist) are "vulcanizing our own rubber" in making our own single reeds versus buying them.
(100 people stand poised to differ---hear me out first.)
No machine you buy, no matter how elegant, no matter how much better than others, no matter how freshly sharpened its knives, is going to cut reeds with the human hair accuracy of say Vandoren.
Not that this precision, by the way, is anything but a mere starting point.
Frankly, I think its miraculous when a professional cane reed actually does play well out of the box. Why on earth would you expect it to? The uniform cutting of a highly non uniform substance, (even excellent cane can have inter-reed lack of uniformity) yields high degrees of lack of uniformity in *play* (if not cut) that a good reed needs.
So, unless you have access to amazing cane, (which given its inter-tube variability will still necessitate you to work on the reed once the basic pattern is cut) I just don't see you saving much time or money making reeds from scratch, a get a product for the more time you put in to making it.
Now maybe my mindset comes from the idea that I need to work on factory reeds with ATG like methods beyond most people's patience level, but doing so yields me a very large percentage of pretty good reeds (sure, there's reeds that won't play no matter what you do) at lower cost and time than "vulcanizing my own rubber."
I have to laugh. Ed Palanker, who's opinion I respect, wrote here in '08 of the time in using this, and more recently on other posts that with his excellent cane supply gone, factory reeds made even more sense.
The UHL may be a phenomenal home reed making machine. But on its best day its not a computer controlled, quality assured, $20 million diamond reed cutter machine at 56 Rue Lepic, or Aria, Steuer, Gozalez or D'addario Reeds, etc.
Post Edited (2017-08-06 08:31)
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