Author: johnt
Date: 2007-12-22 17:40
Yes, good to see this exchange here. I use a steel bellied plaque to refine the tip of my oboe reeds & then to get the last fraction of a mm thickness off & it's only .01 mm or .02 mm (less than the thickness of a human hair) I switch to a bellied wooden ebony plaque. Oboe teachers tell you never to do this. A general statement. John Mack was emphatic about this. He would never allow his students to use contoured plaques. Au contraire, I find that it is so much easier & faster to use the contoured plaques at the tip refining stages & almost guarantees that there will be no splitting of the tip when you get down to .10 mm or less which is what the tip requires to ensure that the rest of the sculpted reed vibrates properly. Anyway, with this as a lead-in to this thread, after the tip is scraped to where I want it, I pinch it shut "on water" that is I put the reed in water for a second or two & let capillary action work, then dip the plaque in water, insert & pinch front & back. Kerry Willingham has an excellent video on his reedmaker website which shows exactly how to do this. The reed closes down to playable status with no leaks. I can't speak for the European scrape, this may or may not work, but for the long American scrape, I get reeds which play fine & which generally last through three or four days of practice/rehearsals/concerts. I should also mention that the pinch is only after I get each blade fully scraped. I only do this once (heart & back), however. If I need to do a second time I only pinch the heart & always on a flat plaque (wetted) with a soaked reed. The reed MUST be wet to do this.
http://www.reedmaker.com/Squeezing.mov
Best,
john
|
|
The Oboe BBoard
.jpg){kind=small}
