ProneOboe

Clipping an oboe reed is such a tiny task, and you might do it dozens of times as you construct and polish each reed.  Are you doing it safely? Do you know the trick to neatly undercutting the lower blade?  Or WHY you would want to do so?  The Five Minute Reedmaker can help. Here's my previous illustrated blog post about that undercutting process. Here's the YouTube playlist with all of my other Five Minute Reedmaker videos.   You could subscribe right there if you wanted to - I'm dropping a video each week until I run out of things to talk about.  Here's my website, where you can order reeds or cane or ask me questions.   Questions will keep these videos flowing!  Here's how you can send me your own reeds to analyze and improve on video for your learning pleasure!

Yes, I can make a reed in five minutes.  And I can play it.  But this is not my ideal way to work - the cane needs time to settle between soakings, and I find that my stability and longevity improve dramatically when I take MORE time rather than less to get to my finished product.  What I actually tend to do is work batches of cane - from pre-gouged to blank, to rough-scraped, to finished, and to polished - over the course of several days. In an email, Beth asked: I’d like to hear your ideas about quality control during each step of the process, from cane selection to final scraping.  What would cause you to discard a piece of cane, or a blank, or scraped reed? Her question seemed to go along beautifully with this video, already in the planning stages, so I've covered quality control along with my Four-Day, Under-Five-Minutes-A-Day, step-by-step Batch Processing video. These Five Minute Reedmaker lessons post once a week on Youtube.  You can subscr...

This gig did not start out promising.  We had a LOONNNNGGGG three hour rehearsal the first night with no soloists, on a fairly dull and repetitive score, filled with heavy irrelevant playing.  We are all coming off summer break, and I'll tell you, I've been practicing, but I was not prepared for 40 pages of long tones and periodic loud interjections.  My face was falling off by the end.  This was a rock and roll concert, a symphonic arrangement of The Who's Quadrophenia.  I did not know this music.  But listening to the symphonic arrangement of its background music I was unmoved.  I was sitting among people who can be... cynical.  I was heading that way myself. But the next afternoon our soloists arrived.  Alfie Boe.  Billy Idol.  Eddie Vedder. And Pete Townshend.  And things immediately improved.  They could not have been more delightful - because they were all SO INTO IT.  The rehearsal was a full run through, a f...

This week I am releasing TWO videos.  They go together, but I couldn't bring myself to combine them - it's ridiculous for the FIVE MINUTE Reedmaker to appear to take TWELVE minutes on a single concept, however important. Hence, two videos. The very tip of the reed is the most crucial area, and the easiest thing to ruin as you scrape.  It is by far the thinnest section of the reed, so it's terribly sensitive to errors - a micron's worth of thickness in the wrong place, or a single grain unnecessarily removed on the side can wreck the whole thing. In this first video I draw and discuss the various dimensions I consider as I create the tip and transition. In this second video I demonstrate four different methods of GETTING to that good transition and tip.  Four different knife techniques, in ascending levels of difficulty and danger. These Five Minute Reedmaker lessons post once a week on Youtube.  You can subscribe to me there, or keep watching this space...

Steve and I were watching YouTube last night and we watched an hour long interview with renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about fountain pens.  Because we love fountain pens.  And science.  And because at heart we are old, old people. And Dr. Tyson, bless his heart, was so adorably, geekily delighted with his collection of Space-themed fountain pens, and although the interviewer was trying to wrap up he kept showing us more and more pens and talking about their nibs and the ink he chooses to put in them and why he always has to have a pen that posts, which is a term I had not known but means that the cap has to fit on the back of the pen while you are writing.  He insists on this because otherwise the pen is too small and insubstantial for his large hand and for his comfort.  And he demonstrated writing with one of his pens, and the interviewer pointed out that he holds it a long way back from the tip. And Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "If you hold it ...

What can you learn from your reed before you even put it in the oboe?  We have two great tools - the beep and the crow. There's a lot of confusion out there, though, about these diagnostic tools.  A case in point is an email I received recently: Josue wrote: Every time I read about crowing the reed in books, or talk about it with teachers and colleagues, they say the reed must crow a pitch of C. However, I notice some of my reeds that crow on C are actually flat in intonation. I notice also that the beeping of those reeds (when you put the reed as if you were actually playing) is flat too.  And in the other way, some of the reeds that beep in C are actually crowing in C#. Is this difference in pitch between beeping and crowing normal? Should the beeping and crowing have the same pitch? Or which one is more important to obtain a good intonation? Should I keep the C pitch in the beeping or in the crowing? What's he even talking about?  The Five Minute Reedmaker ex...

It's teaching time again. I've had 16 first lessons in the past two weeks - almost all continuing students, but in each case the first lesson of a new school year and the first after a long summer break. Every year I find it helpful to reflect on the past and set goals for the future, so I always ask something like, "what do you want to work on this semester?"  And usually the response is something like, "I don't know - um - technique?" This year I began to change it, and I asked, "What are you good at now? And what do you want to get better at?" First, I observed that EVERY student, without exception, ignored the first question and answered only the second.  Second, I was surprised that EVERY student gave me a clearer, more focused response to the new version of my question than the old version.  Even though no one was willing initially to come out and say that they did things well, having that anchor to their internal storytelling caused...