 The Oboe BBoard
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Author: claire70
Date: 2012-02-19 20:09
Okay, this might sound like a stupid question but I'm hoping someone out there can recognise what I'm saying!
I've been making reeds for around 2 years now - although not that assiduously, maybe 2 or 3 per month. I buy the cane ready gouged and shaped, and start from the tying on stage. It used to be when I started, that I felt like I had to scrape for AGES before it got to a stage where I could comfortably blow. So although that was a bit annoying because it took so long, it felt like I had a lot of control over the 'fine tuning'. But recently, all the reeds I make seem to go from 'definitely not there yet' stage to 'too soft' really quickly, yet at the same time as being too soft they are also uncontrollable, a bit wild and often stuffy, and generally not vibrating nicely. Does that make any sense?! So I feel like there is not enough resistance there, but at the same time it's not playing *right* so I'm chipping away doing a scrape here and a scrape there to try and improve it, and thereby ending up with even less resistance. At the end of it I might end up with a reed that plays vaguely okay, but which is too soft for me, so goes in the bin quite quickly.
I'm baffled about this. I thought at first it was maybe a few duff reeds but it's happening with almost every one now. I've actually moved from cane gouged at 'medium' (58-60) to cane gouged at 'hard' (60-62) and if anything it seems to have made the problem worse. The logical answer that presents itself to me is that my embouchure has got 'tougher', but I'm sure that's not the case as I played a lot less for about 6 months of 2011 due to family circumstances and have only been playing more regularly since about last September.
Can anyone shed any light? I'm trying to scrape a German-ish scrape, modelled on Ke-Xun Ge's reeds, if that helps anything.
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reed making question new |
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claire70 |
2012-02-19 20:09 |
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mjfoboe |
2012-02-19 23:18 |
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GoodWinds |
2012-02-20 00:11 |
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WoodwindOz |
2012-02-20 04:24 |
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GoodWinds |
2012-02-20 05:09 |
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claire70 |
2012-02-20 06:47 |
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jhoyla |
2012-02-20 13:32 |
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cjwright |
2012-02-21 00:42 |
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GoodWinds |
2012-02-26 02:15 |
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