Well, I’m off to Bellingham with my wife to spend New Year’s Eve with Peter Hurd. We’re going to play around with instruments, make reeds, and talk shop.
January 1st is the Metropolitan Opera Live broadcast! Don’t miss Hansel and Gretel at a theater near you!
… is a very good instrument! It came to me in kind of a mess. It appeared that the person who recently overhauled the instrument (not Mr. Weber, I checked) kind of hurried through the repadding, and didn’t do a very good job making sure all of the cork pads sealed well. A lot of them weren’t laying flat on the tone hole, and so they weren’t sealing very well. I spent 4 hours this afternoon going through every single cork pad on the top joint, and resurfacing each pad just as Mr. Weber showed me and how Moennig had shown him;
The other way a lot of repairmen like to repad a key is with shellac. They “float” the cork in by heating up the shellac, putting in the cork pad, and while the shellac is still hot and soft, they can adjust the cork to the position that seems to sit pretty well across the tonehole. Then they go in and often bend the key just a little bit to get the last remaining bit to cover. I hate the idea of bending a key, but bending is a lot faster than taking off a key, sanding, putting back on, testing, taking back off, sanding again, putting back on, testing, etc. To my knowledge, Loree still does the ole’ graphite and sandpaper technique.
So now I have the topjoint of the EH sealing almost perfectly. The one problem is as I mentioned, the repairman was in a hurry and wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing, so he put a piece of buffer sheet cork on the bottom part of the half key, which is normal. But the problem is that he put it not realizing that the edge is right on an imperfection in the cork, where there’s a natural “swiss cheese-like” hole, so it leaks. I’m going to have to get that replaced, and then the bottom joint has 3 skin pads which aren’t doing the horn any favors. Finally, the low B key is buckling, so I’ll need to take a good look at it.
But the BC horn plays at least (although I still have to push the half-hole down very hard) and I can get a good sense of the sound. It has a very warm, beautiful clean sound to it, and has a good register. It doesn’t have a left F, which would be another $400 or so to get added on. I have worked out a deal with Hannah to rent the EH for a month from her, and by then I should have the other KK EH horn back from the shop so that I can compare the two horns side by side. If I decide to keep the BC, she’ll count the rental fee toward the purchase. Meanwhile, anyone looking for an older special Loree EH?
As for Hannah, I can officially say that she has been nothing but a delight to deal with. Originally, I was interested in this BP English Horn back in July, but I couldn’t get back to the States in time to try it, and I lost out on the opportunity to buy it. I didn’t give her a second thought, but obviously she did. She sent me an email last week about this BC English Horn (because she knew I was looking for a C series or a B series EH at the time) and offered me to test it out first. She’s been more than generous, and I will certainly deal with her again if need be.
I received my Royal bell back from Mr. Weber yesterday. I had sent it to him to get an update on the bore adjustment. Recently, I oiled the bore of the oboe with grenadilla wood oil which had some really nice effects. I oiled it on the outside probably a total of 10 coats, taking all of the keys off and letting each coat soak in. Finally, the coats stopped soaking in so I figured it was pretty saturated. I put one coat in the inside of the bore and *POOF*! Lots of tuning problems occurred, which probably means the bore was so dry that it soaked up the oil, changed shape, and got messed up. Anyways, I needed it to be re-updated.
I’ve been playing quite a bit with the Royal bell, and I never realized how much better the Royal bell plays with MORE OPEN reeds. With my usual smaller openings, it just feels nice up to a Mezzo Forte/Forte. I can’t get much more than that. But when I use the same smaller opening reed with my GV bell, the reed sounds and feels great. The GV bell just has a more resonant feel to it, but it is a bit brighter. Since I’ve been trying to get more cover in the sound, I’ve been going back to the Royal bell.
This is obviously going to effect how I make reeds for clients! I need to make reeds with my Royal bell for my reed clients who play a Royal, which there are quite a few. Meanwhile, there are also quite a few playing on B series and C series instruments.
So a few months ago I asked my sister if she’d consider ever painting a work for our new home. My sister’s name is Johanna Wright, and she’s a very talented painter. Very soon, her first children’s book will be published, entitled “The Secret Circus”. She was always the most artistic one of the family, and moved out to NYC to sell her artwork for 7 or 8 years. She did very well, and decided that she had built up enough of a customer base to move back to Oregon, where she’s settled with long-time-boyfriend-recently-turned-husband up in Portland. Her decision to move, along with my other second sister Kirsten’s recent move back to Portland with her husband, son and daughter, all contributed greatly to my decision to come to Oregon.
For Christmas, my family draws names and only gives one gift to one other family member. Families of 10 (2 parents, 4 siblings and 4 spouses along with 2 grandchildren now) can be very complicated to shop for during the holidays so we just decided to simplify. I had my brother-in-law’s name. My mother had mine. Namju had my mother’s, and my second sister Kirsten had Namju’s. But this year we received an extra special gift.
I had asked Johanna to paint me a musical painting, and she certainly did. I love our new 20” x 20” addition to our living room, and I’m very grateful for such a loving and wonderful sister.
New Poll on the lower right-hand side. Just curious. Please click on one! Totally anonymous (unless you choose to leave your name.)
Reed orders have slowed down recently, which is really too bad because I’m now making some of the best reeds of my life. This vacation has taken me on a mission to give me more cover, more warmth in the tone, and more stability in my low notes. I messed with everything; shaper tips, gouge stuff, and I even mixed up my staples a bit. My biggest changes were in my scrape of course, and I’ve worked long and hard to try to draw out these in a diagram.
The first picture on the left is the “before” and on the right is the “after”. As you can tell, I’m leaving more in the middle of my tip, and just leaving the tip thicker in general. The problem I was having was in doing so, my reeds were still quite “tippy” sounding, so I had to shorten my tips to raise pitch and to have the reed vibrate purportionately. The results have turned out great, and I’m getting great feedback from some reed clients who have recently ordered from me, saying nothing but positive things.
I’ve also started approaching my scrape a bit differently. Previously, I would scrape the heck out of the heart and then fine tune the tip to build in the proper resistance and balance. But I’ve been working a bit slower now, and leaving the heart thicker in general until the very end, and then start taking little by little out of the heart until my reed is perfectly balanced. It’s giving me a bit more to blow against, and more stability as well. I couldn’t be happier with the changes.
I’m still working on my embouchure shift, but all is going well. It just takes patience and time.
I’m enjoying my vacation very much as I practice up my major thirds clear up to high G and back down. It’s something I just never really spend a lot of time sorting out and making sure they’re perfectly even, but I’m enjoying the challenge a lot. It’s forced me to become a lot more comfortable with the right hand Ab key as I go from C - Short E - D - Short F - G - Short E - Short F - D and back down.
Some good news is that I’m getting an EH gouging machine soon! I just need to send the check away and I’ll receive an old Reynolds EH gouging machine that I can fix up and begin using. I’m also getting a Graf guillotine with that order. A man posted a Graf planing board/planer on the IDRS forum and I responded to that, so I will also receive that soon as well. So I’ll have the Gouger, planing board/planer, and the guillotine.
I also purchased an old Loree EH from Peter Hurd back in September. The problem with it was it didn’t have the C# articulation key, Left hand F, and had a funky octave system that was kind of a cross between an automatic and a semiautomatic. So I sent it to Marvin Kranz in St. Louis to do a bunch of keywork on it. He’s adding the C# articulation key, changing the octave system over to a regular semi-automatic octave system, and adding an adjustment screw on the end of the F#-G# bridge. The horn interestingly has a left hand C#, and he said he couldn’t fit on a left hand F without removing the C#. Mr. Hiniker likes left hand C#s on his horns, and if it really becomes an issue to me, maybe I’ll take the horn over to him and see if he could make me a special key for a left hand F. The whole process is very time-consuming, and I’ve been waiting for quite a while, but I really hope it turns out to be the horn I think it will be. It had a very special feel to it before I sent it off. The upper register really sat up well and had excellant projection. Currently the project stands at about $4200 total.
The problem is Hannah wrote me recently to tell me she had a new BC Loree EH, which was spectacular. So she’s sending that up my way after Christmas. Which means I might need to sell the other EH to purchase the BC if it’s better. Decisions decisions decisions.
This vacation has been one of the most productive vacations in a long time. It’s finally given me some time to:
The work is paying off. Yesterday I played a small gig with Helena who being a critic of my sound, even noticed the difference and gave me positive feedback.
The other day I drove up to Portland to take a lesson with Karen Wagner, 2nd oboe of the Oregon Symphony. I’ve heard some great things about her from different people, and she was friends with one of my previous teachers, Larry Brezicka, who spoke very highly of her. She gave me some good tips and helped point out some ways I was cheating; not vibrating certain notes; short-changing the rhythm in places; giving up on some eighth notes rather than vibrating all of the way through. It was a good lesson, and has given me some good things to work on as I ponder the piece. I’m hoping to get up and get some of Martin Hebert’s time as well.
New Year’s Eve/Day plans include going up to Bellingham to spend a few days with Peter Hurd and his wife. New Year’s Morning we’ll be going to Lynnwood (North of Seattle) to catch the Met broadcast of Hansel and Gretel, also being shown in 600 other theaters around the world. Should be a great time.
I’m selling my Barr machine, which is a dual radius gouge. It’s all brass, with tight bearings, and a great curve on it currently. It’s exactly like a Graf machine, except it doesn’t have the eccentric bearing inside the carriage. Asking $450.
It’s been 2 days since my friend threw his “The REAL Sweeney Todd” party where he invited us over to watch Angela Lansbury and George Hearn. I haven’t seen Sondheim before, and didn’t know anything about the story of Sweeney Todd, but the musical certainly disturbed me! And while those around me cheered and laughed and had a gay ole’ time, I was in emotional distress wondering who was a bit off their rocker, them or me!
I told my friend afterward. It’s the kind of musical that I’m sure if I watched again two or three times, I’d appreciate it for it’s musical, structural, and compositional genius. But then again… I’m not sure I ever want to watch it… EVER. I found it very disturbing.
Not sure if I want to really watch the Big Screen version, although I can’t imagine them making it as disturbing as the original musical. (The original has a rape and a masturbation scene for chrissake!)
