I worked on reeds today (both single and double). My favorite reed tip: don’t adjust your best one. Adjust some others until one of them is the best, and then go back and work on the first one if you like.

Adjusting reeds can be a little risky, so gamble on a reed that you won’t miss too much if it doesn’t survive. And don’t put all your eggs in one basket, concentrating all your efforts trying to perfect one reed—try to bring several up to a playable level.

Keep those knives sharp!

But, frankly, not everyone is up to the challenge.

The basic reedmaking process can be learned within a few lessons, but developing the skills well enough to make good reeds consistently can take years, and most reedmakers will continue to develop and modify their approach over a lifetime.

Reedmaking is expensive, too. A set of the most basic tools for making reeds from preprocessed (gouged, shaped, and, for bassoon, profiled) cane costs as much as several boxes of clarinet or saxophone reeds, and the cane doesn’t come cheap, either. If you want the control of doing your own gouging, shaping, and so forth, the additional equipment may cost you nearly as much as a pro-line clarinet.

And, of course, reedmaking takes time. I’ve heard the “rule of thumb” that an oboist, for example, should spend an hour making reeds for every hour he or she spends practicing. I don’t know that I agree entirely, but you get the idea of what kind of commitment is involved.

So, if I’ve now talked you out of making your own reeds, what are your options?

1. Your best option, short of making your own, is to buy handmade reeds face-to-face from a real-live oboist or bassoonist. (More ideas on this below.)
2. The distant second-place option is to buy handmade reeds from a faraway source, such as reeds ordered over the internet.
3. The worst option is the mass-produced, machine-made reeds that you are likely to find in a local music store or order from a big-box online music retailer.

Here’s why:

Sources for handmade reeds, bought face-to-face

The easiest and best way to buy reeds from a real live oboist or bassoonist is to take lessons from a good teacher. A teacher who is intimately acquainted with your abilities and is influential in shaping your approach is in an ideal position to equip you with reeds. Some teachers even include reed costs in their lesson fees (and charge accordingly).

If you don’t take lessons, another good bet is a nearby professional. If you’re lucky enough to be near one, attend a concert by a local professional symphony orchestra, and make a point of introducing yourself to the oboists or bassoonists afterward. Or, if you’re near a university with at least a medium-sized music program, check the music department’s website for contact info and call or email the oboe or bassoon professor. Symphony players or professors may be willing to sell you reeds themselves, or may be be able to refer you to their more advanced students.

Buying reeds from graduate student oboe or bassoon majors can be an especially good solution for everyone involved. They are likely to be enthusiastic reedmakers, flattered to be asked, eager to please, and always in need of a little extra money.

Thanks for reeding…

The Devcon website makes it hard to find information about retail locations, and in fact you have to head over to another web domain to find it. After an unsuccessful morning driving around looking for Duco, I went home and dug up this link:

http://www.itwconsumer.com/wheretobuy.aspx

Select DUCO® CEMENT, TUBE CARDED and your state. The website doesn’t give retailer addresses, but does provide names. I found a store within a half-mile of me that had it for just under a dollar per tube.

If you aren’t familiar with the use of Duco cement in bassoon reedmaking:

After the reed blank is formed and thread-wrapped, apply Duco cement liberally to saturate the thread. When the glue is first applied and at its wettest, you may need to keep the reed on the mandrel for a few minutes, rotating the reed so the the the glue doesn’t drip off. Within a few minutes the glue dries enough that you can move the reed to a drying rack.

After a few hours, the cement dries completely and turns clear and hard, making the thread wrapping into a solid shell. This helps ensure an airtight seal between the two halves of the reed tube, stabilizes the reed tube for the reaming process, and provides a sturdy handle for getting the reed on and off the bocal. It also adds weight to the back end of the reed, so that if you drop it it won’t land tip-first.

Applying Duco cement

If you’re unfamiliar with it, click through to Mike Spark’s website for a quick primer.

If you could use a little practice reading the notes, try eMusicTheory.com’s C-clef trainer. Click on “Settings…,” choose “Tenor clef,” and click “OK,” then click “Start Drill.”

The next step, of course, is to get your fingers to do their thing automatically as you read the tenor clef notes. Try Oubradous for a gentle introduction, then move on to the Milde “Studies in All Keys” Op. 24 (also found in this edition of the Weissenborn method) for a more serious workout.

Related posts:

1. Taking your doubles to the next level
2. Anton von Webern’s Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone, and piano, op. 22

With some simple traffic-tracking tools, I can see what Google searches are leading people to my website. Most times, to my satisfaction, their search brings them to highly relevant content on my site. Other times I know they are not finding quite what they are looking for. So I’d like to address a selection of the searches that have brought people here unsuccessfully lately, and hopefully future searchers will find what they are after.

Recent search: Lord of the Rings tinwhistle

I get lots of searches for this, or for variations thereof including terms like “pennywhistle,” “sheet music,” etc. I assume that most searchers are looking for the “Concerning Hobbits” theme from the movie soundtrack.

It’s a simple tune, and a good place to start learning to use your ears to figure out a melody! Here are a few notes to get you started. Start on the low D (six fingers) of your D whistle:

D E F# A F# E D F# A B D’ C# A F# G F# E

Recent search: bassoon low a fingering

This could possibly be what you mean:

But if you’re looking for an A lower than that, it will require a little special preparation. The instrument’s lowest real note is a B-flat, but the A can sometimes be played by inserting a tube extension into the bassoon bell. There are commercial solutions available, though many bassoonists make their own extension out of PVC pipe or rolled-up paper or cardboard. It will need to fit securely into the bell, and cut to length with some experimentation to get an in-tune A on your instrument. Finger a low B-flat with the tube inserted to get a low A.

The low A appears in a number of important orchestral and chamber works, so serious bassoonists will likely run into it at some point. It may take some planning and pencil marks to get the tube in and out of the bell at the right times. Remember that with the tube in, you can’t play a low B-flat.

Recent search: what do all woodwinds have in common

Good question. It depends on what you want to include as “woodwinds.”

• If you start from something like “mouthblown wind instruments, with an enclosed air column set in motion by air applied to a mechanical structure (such as a reed or blowing edge),” then you manage to include a wide variety of woodwinds, while excluding brasses (air is applied to an anatomical structure—the player’s lips), free reeds such as harmonica, and non-mouthblown instruments like pipe organs, accordions, and various bagpipes.
• If you add to the previous definition something like “producing different pitches by opening and closing toneholes,” you eliminate panflutes, slide whistles, and a few other oddities.
• If you specify woodwinds in the Western tradition, the field narrows considerably; more so if you indicate that you wish to consider only instruments of the “classical” or “art music” traditions, only “modern” instruments, and so forth. By that point I think we have essentially worked our way down to the accepted basic five woodwinds: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone, though there may be a few others (such as recorder) that possibly still qualify.
• It should be noted that “made of wood” typically does not figure into our modern definition of “woodwinds.” The term is dated and misleading, but seems to be here to stay.

It is possible that the searcher was looking for something more like commonalities in the respective playing techniques of the woodwind instruments. I tend to shy away from making broad generalities about this, since each instrument has its own rich, nuanced, and highly specialized tradition. But a few things that I think apply more or less across the board:

• Proper breath support is essential for good intonation, tone, and response.
• Ditto for correct voicing (position of the back of the tongue, defining the size of the oral cavity). Some woodwind players feel that it is important to keep this constant, while others advocate a flexible, mobile voicing. In any case, if the tongue is improperly situated in the mouth, good tone production is compromised.
• Articulation is achieved by bringing the tip of the tongue into contact with a certain point, which varies by instrument and may be a mechanical or anatomical structure. The commonality is that the tongue contacts this point only very slightly and very briefly, for clear and precise articulation.
• Fingers must move swiftly and in perfect synchronization for note changes; once the fingers are in place for the new note, they should exert only the bare minimum pressure to keep keys or toneholes closed, thus avoiding undue tension.

I’ll keep an eye on the Google stats and answer questions that strike my fancy in the future. Questions by email are also welcome!

Happy Snow Day.

The bassoon was the last of the major woodwinds that I added to my arsenal. Looking at it from a strictly pragmatic standpoint, I think that was the right choice for me, and would be for most doublers. Let’s face it: when it comes down to time and money, for woodwind doublers, the bassoon demands a lot of both and doesn’t always return a lot of either.

Bassoons are tremendously expensive. A really playable intermediate-level instrument, used, might cost $5000. Compare this to maybe $500 for a clarinet of similar quality. And the bassoons played by top professionals might run more than $30,000. Sure, a serious violin can cost several times that amount, but then again you can double on a high-quality flute, oboe, clarinet, and a saxophone or two all for less than the cost of a true professional bassoon.

The bassoon presents some unique challenges to the woodwind player. Its keywork is labyrinthine, its tone and pitch are highly flexible, it uses bass and tenor clefs (all the other woodwinds use treble only), and it uses fussy and delicate double reeds (though not so fussy and delicate as oboe reeds). None of these challenges is insurmountable, but they are significant.

And the gig situation for bassoon doublers is relatively bleak. Single reeds and flute are the bread and butter of most doublers, and a good oboe/EH specialist with decent single reeds can be in high demand, too. For the bassoonist, the best bet is to become a low reeds specialist, with excellent bassoon, bass clarinet, and baritone saxophone skills. Note that these again are all seriously expensive instruments. And if you do a lot of your playing at smaller venues, like I do, then the low reed book is usually the first thing to get cut when the budget or orchestra pit are too small to accommodate a full woodwind section.

Are there reasons to play the bassoon as a woodwind doubler? Absolutely. It’s a deeply rewarding instrument to play (if not so much in the monetary sense); it has a rich repertoire, a huge sonic range, and a noble history. And if you are committed enough to learn to play it really well, you may find that you are in demand after all, perhaps not so much for doubling gigs but simply as a serious bassoonist. There are a lot of really fine flutists and saxophonists out there, and bassoonists of equivalent skill are a relatively rare breed.

I’d like to offer a few words of advice to (1) woodwind doublers who are considering picking up the bassoon, and to (2) fine bassoonists who are thinking about getting into woodwind doubling.

1. For woodwind doublers
   • Don’t scrimp too much, but don’t take out a second mortgage either (yet). You don’t need a pre-war Heckel like the players in a top orchestra. At least not at this point. But you do need an instrument that plays in tune and with consistent tone without undue effort. The 200-series instruments by Fox are excellent, and may be all the bassoon you will ever need. They cost maybe twice as much new as a pro-level clarinet or saxophone.
   • Get some lessons. Even if it’s just a few. The bassoon is a different animal than the other woodwinds. There are some secrets you will need to learn before you will sound like the real thing. Fingering the bassoon is more art than science.
   • Get a good reed source. If you took the previous tip seriously, then you’re already set. The best way to get reeds (other than learning, painstakingly, to make your own) is to buy them face-to-face from a real live bassoonist. By “best,” I mean you will get reeds that are adjusted for your climate, embouchure, and instrument, and probably cheaper than ordering from a reedmaker on the Internet. Mass-produced reeds from your neighborhood music store are a waste of money for someone who already has an ear for pitch and tone.
   • Don’t skip the basics. The big Weissenborn book is a good place to start. Really practice all the “easy” stuff at the beginning. Then maybe jump over to Oubradous for some serious scale and arpeggio work, and then come back to the Weissenborn book to play the Milde studies. The bassoon’s technique is just too complicated and nuanced to jump into gigs with a fingering chart and a hopeful expression.
2. For bassoonists
   • Your quickest and easiest way to improve your employability through doubling is as a bassoon specialist with strong bass clarinet and baritone saxophone. I would suggest buying a high-quality student model clarinet and alto saxophone and taking a serious approach to learning them (lessons, practice time, etc.) while you save your pennies for a nice baritone saxophone and bass clarinet. A good intermediate-level baritone saxophone like the Yamaha 50-series will serve you well. If you’re going to be serious about low reeds, spring for a low A instrument. There are also decent intermediate bass clarinets to be had, but no good tried-and-true intermediate models with range to low C, so you may need to bite the bullet and get a really professional-level bass clarinet.
   • If you are independently wealthy and enjoy heavy lifting, consider ultimately expanding to bass saxophone and the contrabass clarinets, and tie up every low reeds gig for miles around. Or if your budget and trunk space are a little tighter, you can keep working on clarinet and higher saxophones, and eventually add flute and piccolo.
   • Become a jazz lover. In woodwind doubling situations, you will need to be prepared to play at least a semi-convincing Broadway-jazz style on single reeds. Most bassoonists don’t have real background in that stuff; do some serious listening or maybe take a few lessons with a local saxophonist to pick up some of the nuances of articulation and inflection.

Good luck!