Author: Dutchy
Date: 2007-03-06 03:05
[does happy dance for Elkwoman]
We gotcha now. Crack cocaine ain't got nuthin' on an oboe. ![[grin]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie5.gif)
Yeah, a dry reed won't play at all, you might as well stick a twig in your mouth for all the sound you'll get out of a not-quite-moist-enough reed. This explains why you see orchestral oboists sitting there with their reeds in their mouth during rests.
But you have to watch it in the other direction, too, because a reed that's TOO wet will be stuffy and hard to play--the cane swells up and then vibrates against itself less-than optimally. Three to five minutes of soaking is about right, then whenever you take a break, just dip the reed in the water and lay it aside (don't drop it back into the water every time you rest or after about 20 minutes you'll have a stuffy, unplayable reed.)
Note: Air Pockets Bad.
Smoosh all air pockets relentlessly. Flat air-less lips rule. All air must come from diaphragm and windpipe, not secret reserves in lips.
Also, the most important thing to learn at this stage is to drop your jaw to keep yourself from biting on the reed. Make your mouth a big, open cavern, and make your lips a rounded, muscular cushion around the reed--this keeps you from instinctively closing your jaw and biting out of tiredness and pure frustration just to get the reed to sound.
I found it helpful to follow Fox's suggestion and repeat the word "home" as I placed the reed in my mouth. Put it just on the red part of your lips, say "home", and gently roll the reed into your mouth. You should have only about 1/16th of a inch of the reed protruding inside your mouth. Your lips should be playing on the tip of the reed, not up towards the unscraped part.
Robert Sprenkle's book, The Art of Oboe Playing, is a standard work and is VERY helpful, with good diagrams of exactly how this should look. Available at Amazon.com.
Also, you mentioned somewhere about "breathing through the sides of your mouth".
No. You have to open your mouth to breathe--it isn't physically possible to keep your mouth on an oboe reed AND breathe through the sides. The mouth is either on the reed, or it isn't. It's supposed to encircle the reed, so in order to open your mouth to breathe, you just have to let go of the reed. And this gives you a valuable split-second in which to rest your embouchure muscles.
Also, the biggest challenge in oboe-playing is that you need to exhale first, before you can inhale. Playing the oboe means holding your breath, so you need to let the stale air OUT (think "whoo!" whale spout) before you can bring fresh air in. And you can't exhale like a spouting whale through a teeny opening on the sides of your mouth.
You can't keep your mouth on the reed and breathe through your nose, either, because it isn't fast enough. Your nostrils just aren't designed to allow you to take big gulps of air.
Here is a Youtube video of a girl playing the Marcello oboe concerto. See her big gulps of air? Yeah baby.
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