Author: Dutchy
Date: 2007-02-19 16:37
The double reed for an oboe faces a much more complex task in terms of physics than the single reed for a clarinet, mainly because the single blade of a clarinet reed vibrates only against the non-resilient mouthpiece and against the player's lip, but the two blades of an oboe reed must vibrate not only against each other, but also against both of the player's lips. The complexity of the physics of it multiplies exponentially.
This adds a great deal of complexity and difficulty to the task of producing a sound that is musically pleasing, and not simply a doubled, louder version of the squawk that you get when you hold a blade of grass between your thumbs and squeak on it.
Then you have the fact that since there is no solid mouthpiece to bolster the oboe reed, as there is in a clarinet, the player's lips in essence must function as a mouthpiece, which adds complexity to the task at hand: the embouchure must be sturdy enough to support the two blades of reed, but flexible enough to produce a mellow sound, and also to fluctuate with the demands of the music, as both dynamics and pitch are controlled by the embouchure.
So far the folks who tinker around with plastic oboe reeds haven't found a plastic that reproduces the physical structure of the wood of the reed cane arundo donax closely enough to get it to work properly as a double reed. The main difficulty is in getting a plastic that can be thinned at the very edge of the tip to the degree that reed cane is capable of--an oboe reed can be merely the thickness of a sheet of paper at the tip, but when you get plastic that thin, it's not resilient enough to vibrate properly, and it just collapses with the pressure of the embouchure, and it doesn't give you the capability of obtaining very subtle differences in sound the way that cane does.
They can get close, but not as close as they can for clarinet reeds. This is, again, because the task that the oboe reed faces is much more difficult in terms of physics, than a single reed. And so there is no market for it, and so since there's no market, there's really very little research going on. It's a vicious circle.
My daughter plays the clarinet, and in her circle, plastic reeds don't even get a look-in, no matter how long they may last. The feeling is that they don't really have that good clarinet sound, and are suitable only for small children whose parents are really extraordinarily cheap and who want their kid to keep the same reed for an entire school year. And since the standard Rico starter reeds are so inexpensive, there's really no reason to buy your kid a plastic clarinet reed.
So if there's really no traffic in plastic clarinet reeds, there's even less traffic in plastic oboe reeds.
Oboe reed-making is generally speaking considered a chore, a necessary evil. I don't know anyone who wakes up in the morning thinking, "Oh boy! Today I get to make reeds!"
Once you get to a certain stage, you find that mass-produced reeds, while acceptable for beginners, aren't capable of quite as refined a sound as you'd like, and so you start making your own. Ninety-percent of an oboe reed is in the scraping and the testing (with 10% being in the quality of the reed cane to begin with), and since scraping is so labor-intensive, and since the mass-produced reedmakers just don't have the time to sit there and patiently scrape the reed/try it/scrape it some more/try it again, etc., it stands to reason that outside of having an oboe professional custom-making reeds for you one at a time, you're going to have to make your own reeds if you want a different sound than what is commercially available.
But there are a number of mass-produced reeds available that are quite suitable for beginners, that won't break the budget (once you reconcile yourself to the fact that each one costs at least $6). You shouldn't let the specter of having to make your own reeds get in the way of wanting to learn the oboe, because you don't really have to.
|
|
The Oboe BBoard
.jpg){kind=small}
