Skip to main content

Reed Repair Shop: Commercial Reeds

Commercially made reeds - those profiled-cane, shinily-wound Jones and Lesher and Emerald Reeds - have their place. They are designed for beginners, or for young players, or for players that don’t have reed-making skills of their own or a private teacher where they live.  And there are thousands of people who fall into that category.  These reeds are designed to be relatively affordable, and they are designed to WORK, immediately out of the box.

But they are not meant to sound GREAT, and they are not 100% conistent, and they are certainly not meant for an advancing player to make beautiful, nuanced music on. 

The ideal answer is to make your own reeds, or work with a good teacher who can help you by supplying reeds at the appropriate strength or by working on what you have - but there are plenty of scenarios in which you might find yourself holding a store-bought reed AND possessing high oboe standards, and wanting to make the one thing match the other.  Maybe you ARE a teacher, and your big-eyed student has just brought one of these in.  Maybe you are desperate because your last good reed just cracked down the middle and the only reed in miles comes from your local Q and F.  Maybe you have no better source, but you want to sound better. 

In this video I analyze and repair a random assortment of reeds from MY local Q and F, and offer advice and suggestions. 



Here's the YouTube playlist with all of my other Five Minute Reedmaker videos.  You could subscribe right there if you wanted to - I've finished dropping weekly videos but there are a few more in the pipeline, and I'll keep making them as relevant questions keep occurring to me!

Here are the other Reed Repair Shop videos.

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!






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IDRS 2014 - Day Two and OUT

I'm writing my Day Two report while all of my colleagues and friends, new and old, are well into their Day Three experience.  I was terribly sad to leave NYC, and IDRS.  In past years I've found myself sort of oboe-ed out by the third or fourth day, but I was nowhere near that point last night when I had to begin my schlep to the airport.  On the up side, I am home and spent the morning with Zoe and Steve, and I'm safely on the correct side of Lake Michigan well before my concert tonight, which was the important purpose of my travel plans - but there are SO MANY MORE great events happening at NYU.  Best of luck to everyone performing! Yesterday, among other performances, I enjoyed THREE recitals featuring music for oboe and bassoon.  Be prepared for a husband-wife recital coming down the pike in the next year or two, as I loved much of the new music that I heard.  First I enjoyed hearing ToniMarie Marchioni and two of her colleagues from the University ...
4 comments
Read more

Practice+ App - and my FIRST EVER GIVEAWAY

You know how, when you are practicing, you need to have your metronome on your stand and turn it constantly up and down as you work through a technical passage?  And you also want to play in tune, and make sure you are staying consistent with your pitch.  So while your metronome is clicking away on your stand, you also have to turn half-way around to look at the screen of the big tuner which has to be plugged into the wall because it eats batteries otherwise.  And if you also want to record yourself to listen to your progress, you have to have your laptop on with the big mic plugged into it, and that’s on still another surface, so you have to move your stand around so you can orient to all three, and then your giant stack of music-in-progress falls off the stand and onto the floor and out of order and the next ten minutes are spent not practicing at all but just trying to return to normalcy. Does this sound familiar? I was sent a free promo copy (full disclosure) of an...
4 comments
Read more

Beauty of Sound

In our dress rehearsal Saturday afternoon, the conductor did exactly what I often do to my students - he asked the violins to play more beautifully, and they did.  He didn’t tell them how, or give them a flowery expressive speech, he just asked for more beauty of sound, and they immediately gave it to him.  To a great extent the sound we produce is set, based on our equipment and the shape of our mouths and our bodies - but it can be altered, too.  Adjustments in reeds and instruments can go a long way, but the key change we can make is in our own minds. I don’t know how to explain it physically, but if you determine the sound you want to make you can produce it.  Or at least you can lean in and approach it.  This is something I’ve been paying a lot of attention to lately in my own playing.  As I prepare the Saint-Saëns Sonata to perform on our Oboe Studio Recital (tonight at 7 - details HERE ), my approach is largely about beauty of sound and vibrato....
7 comments
Read more