Author: Dutchy
Date: 2007-05-12 15:59
It's a handmade reed from a lesser-known reedmaker (well, okay, "unknown") but she was mentioned in passing somewhere else, and she does have a website (not an eBay seller, IOW), so I thought I'd give one of her $14 "student" reeds a try.
And it whistles.
In the lower register it's not as noticeable, but in the upper register, it sounds exactly as though it had a piece of wax paper in there, doing the "wax paper & comb" routine. And on the high B and C, it's quite an obvious tiny shriek underneath the oboe tone itself.
And I can flex the reed in and out, open and closed, with my embouchure, and make it whistle variously on cue. Which is fairly entertaining, but still...not what one hopes for in a $14 reed. Plus $6 shipping, which makes it a $20 reed.
Her return policy is basically "no returns". And I knew that going in, so...my bad.
But is there anything I can do at this end? Will it eventually stop whistling as the reed gets broken in? Or is it me? I tried playing it with the embouchure in "do not whistle" mode, but it didn't help; there's just a buzzy musical wheeze in there that will not go away.
How common is it for reeds to end up with a whistle? Even the most appalling factory reeds I've had didn't whistle. They were flat, or harsh, or too open, or had the cork falling off, but they didn't whistle.
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The Oboe BBoard
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