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Re: The heart

Author: cjwright
Date: 2007-08-16 15:18

Just how much is a lot? My hearts end up around .47 or so.

In my experience, I've come across two common American scraping techniques.

People either like to scrape a ton out of the heart, but leave the heart longer for wind resistance (to compensate for the thinness), while defining the tip a bit thicker and leaving more in the back. This is a style that I think people who take more reed into their mouth prefer, since the longer heart is also the location of the fulcrum and thus gives more space for them to rest their lips on. A heart on this style for me would be closer to a .42 or so.

The other style, the one I prefer is thinly defining the tip, sloping up to the center of the heart, and sloping back down to the windows, where it slopes back up again until it reaches the bark. The tip is longer than the other style, the heart is shorter, and the reed is "flexible" in its pitch, but not uncomfortably wild. This puts the fulcrum closer to the integration line/tip, and requires a different embouchure.

I think identifying which style you prefer is one step to figuring out your dimensions. The second is identifying your gouge. Is it single radius or double radius? Single radius often feels like your scraping a bit more off since the spine is actually inverted and located on the internal arch of the piece of cane, rather than having to scrape it on the outer surface of the cane. How thick are your sides? How strong of a curve is your gouge? All these gouge questions are relative to the amount you should take out of your heart. The stronger the arch (meaning the thinner the sides, but the bigger the openings you can maintain), the less you need to leave in the heart, thus giving more flexibility.

Hope this gives you some stuff to think about.

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