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Re: Changing Reeds - redux

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2017-08-11 20:56

(Apologies for the length of this post)

Going back to a previous thread about material vs design in determining reed vibrating characteristics - mainly resistance or strength - I think it's not likely that cane has changed so much in the last 40 years. We can assume Vandoren wasn't throwing away stacks of cane that it deemed too hard for reeds. So the #5 strength was almost certainly the densest, most resistant cane in the harvest. It then seems fairly clear to me, unless someone inside the industry can provide facts to the contrary, that the unplayable stiffness of today's #5s is simply the result of cutting the reeds thicker somewhere, not denser or stiffer cane. And it isn't just the thick-blank reeds - the Traditionals are too stiff as well.

The problem began to form itself in my mind when a few years ago I read a post by Clark Fobes on his blog spot. In it he suggested, as I remember (I'm heavily paraphrasing), that stiffness has more influence than thickness on the sound quality a reed produces. The gist of what he was suggesting was that a #5- stiffer, more dense cane - will always produce a different sound than softer cane, no matter how much wood you scrape out of the #5 to make it respond. Clark, if I remember, was writing about the importance of cane density in making reeds by hand, that you'd never be able, no matter how much you thinned a hand-made reed, to achieve a certain firmness of sound if the cane were simply too soft.

Maybe the reason a player back in the 1960s used a #5 and adjusted it to play with less resistance instead of just using a softer strength was that the softer reed didn't produce the same tone quality. But today, having to use softer strengths - softer cane - because of the more resistant profile means accepting a different sound quality than that produced by those more vibrant #5s of 40-50 years ago. Keep in mind that by all reports all of the reeds of a given model are cut to the same specs. The measurements didn't - couldn't - change only for the softer strengths while leaving the #5s as they used to be. Thus, the #5s got stiffer along with the rest of the line. And to use them, IMO, you need to treat them as blanks and do more hand scraping than most players want to do, especially since every stroke with a knife or rush becomes one more opportunity to make a mistake that ruins the whole attempt.

I can't shake the feeling that somewhere along the line Vandoren (with other manufacturers following to compete in the same markets) switched to the reed equivalent of "New Coke" more or less unnoticed. Maybe what we need is a campaign to bring back the "Classic Coke" Vandorens. Records of the old dimensions (if I'm right that they've changed significantly) must exist somewhere that could be recreated on modern CNC cutters.

Karl

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