Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2010-01-12 18:14
A few thoughts:
First of all, I would forget about having a "Bonade" sound. If you did, noise or not, you wouldn't need to worry about what the judges for honors band at school think of it. And if you've "modeled" your sound on Bonade's, you must have used recorded examples, in which I've never heard him sound anything but focused, colorful and very flexible. Maybe we've heard different recordings.
Even players whose sounds include some slight reed or air noise when playing softly (this isn't a feature of any really good player's mezzo-forte or louder that I've ever heard up close) sound clean over a fairly short distance - say, the distance to the conductor.
My advice, for what it's worth, is to develop the sound you find the most effective for getting the musical result you want. That necessarily implies deciding on a reed style and strength that you feel comfortable blowing. Different music sometimes demands different sound qualities, and you need to develop the flexibility to change as the musical context demands, but you only postpone the choices involved when you try to sound one way for the concert, another for an audition, a different way when you play in a band section, etc... Find a general sound you consider musical, and then you can learn to vary it to fit specific needs.
If the judges are *really* only 5 feet away, they're not hearing anyone at his or her best. Anytime I've been involved as an audition judge, we've always sat at least at opposite ends of a classroom - 10 or 15 feet is enough to lose most noise players may have in their soft dynamics. If your sound is a musical one, and the extraneous noise isn't loud enough to distract from it, slight noise shouldn't hurt you if the judges are not hovering over your music stand listening for it.
Karl
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