Barbara the oboe, and her other shoes.

Barbara is a very special oboe. She’s a 3 or 4 year old Royal, number NI50, formerly owned by a member of the New Mexico Symphony or something. She has a plastic top joint (which I was looking for since I didn’t know if I’d have a good oboe repairman here in Korea), and a bell off of Loree oboe GV85. Both bells, and the lower joint have had the bore adjusted by the Weber bore adjustment, which has tremendous effects. (He has these reamers that he just sticks right up in the bores and reams them out.)

She also has a Kooiman Thumb rest, since I was having wrist problems earlier. Particularly practicing the 3rd movement of the Saint Saens, my ring finger and pinky kept going numb so I invested in the thumbrest.

So, 3 joints, 1 plastic, 1 from one tree, and 1 from another. She’s kind of a Frankenstein oboe, but she’s mine and I love her. Fantastic projection, good intonation (had to have the high A undercut, the G lowered with finger nail polish, and Ab reamed out to raise a bit), and is very smooth and even from interval to interval. The tone color is consistent from note to note, and she is very flexible.

We have recently been talking about oboe bells on the oboe bboard, and today was just another classic example of how substantial of an effect the right bell can have on an oboe.

Today I took my old bell to orchestra rehearsal just for the heck of it to see what I’ve been missing for the past six months while playing on the GV bell. The Royal bell projects less overtones and “ring” to the Royal bell, (making it sound more “dark”). My wife (an amateur cellist) likes the sound of the Royal bell better.

I bought my GV bell (which I like to call “Barbara’s extra pair of shoes) back in February when I was in AZ with Mr. Weber. I went through some 30 different bells trying them all, and it came down to two rebored Covey bells and this rebored Loree bell. Today, I definitely missed the qualities of the GV bell (while practicing all 8 or so of Shostakovitch’s Dances from “Dance Suite”), which has a brighter, “ringier”, more massive sound to it. The GV bell also gets more projection, is more responsive (and therefore easier to play ppp), and is more of the quality that I want in my sound.

The other REALLY interesting thing I found today with my Royal bell was that I could not achieve the FFF sound that I was really striving to. When I play FFF with the GV bell, it holds together, and though it’s loud, I don’t feel like the sound explodes. But today with the Royal bell, I overblew the bell. Badly. The sound combusted around FF, and I felt like I lost control of it.

I took my GV bell to Martin Hebert who is a former Mack student (and very Mack-sounding) and is the current principal of the Oregon Symphony back in February where we tried it out on his 3 Royals that he was playing around with. And while he cautioned me that taking too much wood out of a bell can brighten up the tone too much, after trying out the GV bell his evaluation was that it was right on the edge, and he found it very interesting. He also gave me a discount on my lesson in exchange that he could take bore measurements of the bell.

Since Barbara has a plastic top joint and consequentially will never change, I don’t see myself selling it for a long long time. I am on the waiting list for one of Tom Hinniker’s oboes, but those are at least 3 years waiting, and by then, I hope to be financially ready to buy it and keep Barbara as a backup.

Meanwhile, I’m also looking into used EHs, particularly Loree B series EHs. So if anyone is selling one, let me know! (The two on Peter Hurd’s website are both sold. Apparently he doesn’t like to update his website very often.)

Rigotti Cane, Case Solved.

I’ve posted previously about my struggles with cane and my most recent post being after I made three reeds with Mr. Nissen’s advice. Well, this morning I picked up the three reeds I made two full days ago and thought I’d give them a rip.

In my previous posting about Philadelphia style reeds, one of Mr. Weber’s quotes says, “I think that the tip-to center of heart must be a gradual incline in thickness, though of course this gradual incline is more gradual at some places than others.” I’ve played around with this much, and I find that for my reeds, the thickest place of the heart isn’t exactly smack in the middle of the tip but rather about 2/3rds of the way back in the heart (back from the tip that is.) Moving this “thickest place of the entire reed” around has different effects on the resistance and tone of a reed, and the late Ronald Roseman (mentioned in the Jerome Roth article) even had an odd habit of leaving an entire little dot of bark at the very back.

(Above: pages from David Ledet’s Oboe Reed Styles of Ronald Roseman’s reeds)

When I am making reeds with different kinds of cane, I usually find the secret of the cane either in the location of the thickest place of the reed, or sometimes the rate of taper. (Just as Mr. Weber said, “…this gradual incline is more gradual at some places than others.”

Well, as I mentioned, I went back to the Rigotti reeds today, and I suppose since they had settled down, I was able to get a better sense of what was vibrating too much, and what wasn’t vibrating enough. So I clipped an entire millimeter off the tip, thinned the corners, and it got better. Then I changed the location of the thickest spot on the heart closer to the back (almost to the very back of the heart) while tapering the middle of the heart much faster to around .35 and leaving the front of the heart close to .32 or so. And the result: a great sounding reed! I even played it in orchestra rehearsal!

So now I think Rigotti is a fine cane. I just have to scrape it a lot differently than other kinds of cane, but I can make it work.

When you try and fail, try, try, and try again!

Philadelphia style reeds

Bautbois recently asked me about some differences of Philadelphia style reeds compared to Mack-style reeds. There are a million and one differences, but structurally, there is a major one in the contour of a Philadelphia style reed. Mr. Weber has a diagram in his book that looks like this:

As you can see, the reed has a curvy contour to it. The late Oberlin professor James Caldwell, a student of de Lancie, put it as such.

“The end of the tip must be thinner than the back of the tip, but only slightly. The sides of the tip must be thinner than the center of the tip, but only slightly.”

(Above: a reed de Lancie scraped on for one of his students, taken from Mr. Weber’s The Reedmaker’s Manual)

Mr. Weber once wrote me a 7-page letter when put into MS Word at 10 point font, in which he said,

“Keep the tip very thin at its edges, and allowing the cane to increase toward the blend, through the blend, into the mid point of the heart, where it may or may not get thinner in the back, leaving considerable bark above the thread. All surfaces of the reed MUST be either getting thicker or thinner, thinking/looking for the back of the scrape and off the tip corners… For my part, I think that the tip-to-center of heart must be a gradual incline in thickness though of course this gradual incline is more gradual at some places than others.”

This picture above is in a packet of information Mr. Weber got from a student who recorded everything she learned about reeds from Mr. Caldwell. Though it’s probably not quite as clear what she was trying to illustrate on the bottom sketch, it is actually an oboe tip with the triangular integration line. I think the grid marks are to illustrate that each square closer to the center of the tip (from left to right) would theoretically get thicker and thicker , while each square closer to the center of the heart (going downward on the sheet) would also be getting thicker.

This concept is quite different from a Mack-style reed, which emphases that the heart must be parallel to each other, rather than curving toward and away as a Philly-style reed does. Thus, you will often hear Mack-students refer to the heart as a “plateau” or “parallels”. In one of her posts about the Mack Camp this past year, Eat, Sleep, Oboe mentions Danna Sundet teaching, “Hearts should be flat from back to front.”

The result is this: (pardon my unsteady photography hand)

Above is a reed of Mr. Weber’s, while below is a reed of Mr. Fred Korman, a former Mack student and retired principal of the Oregon Symphony. As you can see, there is a substantial difference in contour.

I believe the Philly oboe reed does two things: it produces more overtones with more “ring” in the sound (which many folks don’t like, hence they buy the Royals for the extra “cover”) and it makes a reed which encourages one to play on the very tip by changing the fulcrum, thus allowing more of the reed to vibrate.