As I have improved in my reedmaking, I have gotten better at scraping a really thin tip. Really, really thin. While this is a handy skill to have, I find that having a tip as thin as possible is not necessarily the best thing. So if you have my same problems, maybe you also are scraping your reed tip too thin.
You want your reeds to have a certain amount of resistance. I am sure you know that a reed that is too easy to play lacks the quality of sound that oboists are going for. It loses depth and it also loses stability in both the lower an upper registers. I have made the mistake before of getting the tip very thin very early on in the process. Part of this is because I am looking for a good response early on as the most basic function of the reed. But I was relying too much on the tip for this function, and once all the parts of the reed were in place, the tip was overly thinned.
To avoid this, I now concentrate on a good slope from the heart when I am looking for the early crows and hold back on thinning the tip as much as I can. You can always take more cane off, but you can’t put it back on! Once the reed has all its parts in place and I am on the stage of final touches, then I *slowly* thin the tip as necessary, still carefully assessing whether or not there is something else I should scrape first. I used to run to the tip to fix a lot of my problems!
In this picture you can see two reeds with different tips. I like to very gently press the plaque towards myself against the tip to test how much of the plaque shines through or not, and I am doing this in the picture to the left here. As you can see, the left reed has a lot more thickness preserved, and any very thin areas are saved for the corners and sides of the tip where any reed should be the thinnest. The right reed tip is too thin, and you can see the plaque through it all across. In general, this tip has lost all its good shape which is another common problem with tips that are too thin – you lose the room to have any nuance in shape.
So be slow when working on your reed tips and only take off as much as you absolutely have to. That way you can give yourself as much resistance as you like in the final stages!
Have you been scraping your reed tip too thin? What is the number one thing you look for in your tips? Make sure you’re not making my other mistakes!