Author: huboboe
Date: 2012-09-23 22:33
I second Cooper in his comments about measurement and proportion. I arrived at my set of ideal measurements after measuring my best reeds for several years. They were all very similar in proportions, in the heart thickness, in the tip measurements.
Now I hog off wood to those approximate measurements and then worry about finishing and balancing the reed.
As I mentioned earlier, since the blend is a mechanical coupling between the tip and the back, you need to have both of them in place before you can discover what steepness of angle, triangular (or domed) shape, etc, will couple them the way you want. Rough out your reed close to your finished dimensions and then start more refined operations.
I tell my students that the edge of the tip, all the way to where it meets the edge of the blend at the rail, should be as thin as the corner of the tip. So actually, the fan-like blend really extends beyond the drawn dimensions in the charts all the way to the corners in a sweeping arc. The differences in the area beyond the pictured limits are too small to depict graphically, but the blend really is a continuously thinning surface from the heart to the corners with most of the thinning happening in the area that looks, in the drawings, like a triangle or dome. There should be no distinct demarcation between the 'tip' and the 'blend' but rather a distinct change in the slope of the blend.
This continuously thinning slope lets the tip vibrate at whatever frequencies the oboe is asking for, and those vibrations, transmitted along the blend to the back, drive the back in sympathetic resonance at lower frequencies.
Any interruption of the smooth slope of the blend such as lumps, chops, stair-steps, etc act in favor of some frequencies and against others, resulting in less than balanced overtones in the sound.
The corner of the blend shouldn't be cliff-like, because the edge of the back has been thinning, as shown by the bark along the rail which disappears just as it meets the blend.
Frustrating, yes, but patience and repetition will get you there. Your knifework already looks good, and that's the hardest part for most of my students.
Robert Hubbard
WestwindDoubleReed.com
1-888-579-6020
bob@westwinddoublereed.com
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