Author: mschmidt
Date: 2009-10-26 23:46
Well, yeah, except that the difference in blade lengths is about 0.1 mm at most, and if the opening is 1 mm, the angle of the line from one blade tip to the other is arctan (0.1) = only about 6 degrees. I have a hard time believing that that makes any difference whatsoever. Is your embouchre repeatable from day to day to a tolerance of 0.1 mm?
Some oboists (including my present teacher) insist that the unequal blade length has another useful characteristic, in that tonguing can be lighter if the tongue is only touching the longer blade. In my opinion this is like saying that a pillow's effect on a manila folder is more controlled when one side of the manila folder is 1 cm shorter than the other. In other words, yeah, maybe. I didn't want to mention to said teacher that I tend to aim for the corner of the reed when tonguing, as that's a whole 'nother controversy. (See this thread for example: http://test.woodwind.org/oboe/BBoard/read.html?f=10&i=3477&t=3477)
My own hypothesis is that some oboists started cut the tip with a razorblade rather than a knife, and the result was that one blade ended up longer than the other. The results weren't bad, and some folk physics were invented to argue that the blade lengths should be different. This was then taught to students who assumed that there must be hard evidence for the advantage of the practice, and who never bothered to see whether they could tell the difference or not. (And even if they couldn't tell the difference, they convinced themselves that they couldn't tell the difference because they weren't as good or as sensitive as their wonderfully talented teachers.)
Does anyone have any good quantitative studies using statistically significant populations of equal-blade-length and unequal-blade-length reeds, played by "blind" oboists, for which objective measurements of tone and/or tonguing intervals could be taken? I didn't think so. Of course, we don't have objective measurements of anything we do, so if we were only paying attention to proven objective evidence, we'd never learn how to play better or sound better. So maybe there's something to the blade length thing. But, as always, I'm skeptical. Maybe I'll trying cutting some of my reeds with razorblades.
My reluctance to try this is because I sort of like the option of flipping the reed over to see if the reed plays better on the other side. If you clip the tip so one side is longer, and you're convinced the shorter end has to go to the lower lip, you can't flip it. (I made this argument to my teacher and she just responded that I should figure out which is the better side before I clip the tip. OK....)
Mike
Still an Amateur, but not really middle-aged anymore
Post Edited (2009-10-26 23:50)
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