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Re: Soft Reeds are great!

Author: Bob Bernardo
Date: 2017-09-21 18:55

Funny thing - At the ClatinetFest I saw a lot of mouthpieces with patches on them. That's fine!

The first thing I noticed were most of the patches were put on wrong, right at the tip of the mouthpiece. Patches are for your teeth, not to build up the tip of the mouthpieces, so now you have air bouncing back at you because the patches are way too thick and belong were your teeth bite is! In my opinion the patch should not be very thick. But I saw some thick ones and the patches had hole marks in them from the teeth! Now we have a major problem. The player bites really hard if there are holes in the patches. We have to get back to basics.

In this case softer reeds are a must and so is a mirror to see what the embouchure is doing. Practicing with a double lip embouchure is pretty much a must. Every musician should have a mirror on his/her stand or next to them to see what is going on. When you hear a really sweat note come out of the horn, look and see what your embouchure was doing. Same with an ugly note. My guess is hardly anyone these days looks into mirrors. Using a mirror is a must when warming up and doing long tones.

Most of the players today seem to be using softer reeds. Since I import reeds most of the sales are 3 and 3 1/2 strength reeds, with your standard facings. A few players use 4's and only 1 player ever bought a box of 4 1/2's.

With tip openings around 1.03 or so 3 1/2 fits well. For 1.07 to 1.11 we sell a lot of 3's.

With the RD5 Vandoren mouthpiece we still sell 3 strengths, maybe because the facing is longer. I did sell a few 2 1/2 strength reeds to a player using this mouthpiece.

I sell German cut reeds for the German players and even with tip openings under 1.00 the hardly anyone ever plays anything over a 3 1/2. These facings are also long.

So yes keep favoring the softer side of reeds. You will start to hear a fuller sound and a richness and fullness to your sound and it will have a nice ping and ring to it with the right mouthpiece and the right instrument..

Designer of - Vintage 1940 Cicero Mouthpieces and the La Vecchia mouthpieces

Yamaha Artist 2015

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