One of the most important qualities of an oboe reed is its ability to vibrate easily or be responsive. You are not going to get very far if you are struggling to get sound. There are many other technical challenges to playing the oboe, so you should need to force a reed to work on top of it all! So you are going to want to know how to make an oboe reed responsive.
The basic principle of response is that you want the reed to start vibrating at the tip and easily all the way into your oboe. If your reed feels very hard or is stuffy sounding, the vibrations are not traveling properly. Cane that is very thin will vibrate more easily than cane that is very thick. So scraping the reed properly is very important for a responsive oboe reed. Here are all the tips!
Check for Leaks
If your reed has not been tied well and is leaking, this will interfere with the reed’s response. The bigger the leak, the more difficult it will be to get your reed to vibrate properly. This is because your air stream is being siphoned out to the side. This means the proper force and shape of your air are being interfered with. So keep practicing tying your reeds so that there are no leaks. Or find somewhere to get reed blanks so you know you have a good base.
Check for Symmetry
While we have all known reeds that played well with a strange shape, generally good reeds are symmetrical. Hold your reeds up to bright light so that you can see how much light shines through the different sections of your reed. If one window is much darker than the other four, then even that up. The same goes for the blend from tip to heart. It should be even on both blades and just as the spine is equal on both blades. Symmetry helps the reed to vibrate as it was designed and play better.
Test for Response
You can test your reed in three sections to get an idea of where you may have too much cane left on the reed. First, place just the very tip of the reed in your mouth and blow gently (about as hard as a heavy sigh). If the tip vibrates easily, then move the heart just past your lips and blow lightly again. And similarly, when the heart is vibrating easily, place the reed in your mouth all the way to the string and blow gently. The goal is for the reed to play in each section as easily as you want the whole reed to play. Working through the three major sections of the reed this way can alert you to where you need to scrape and can take some of the guesswork out of your scraping.
Proper Tip Scraping
The tip of your oboe reeds should be thinnest in the corners. The heart slopes into the tip in an upside-down “U” shape, making the corners the farthest from the center of the heart and therefore the thinnest if the slope is maintained. Not only does very thin cane vibrate easily, but the vibrations travel through the reed more easily when the transitions between sections are smooth. Blending the tip into the heart needs to be the most precise portion of the reed, so practice a lot of very careful scraping with a very sharp knife in this area to greatly improve the response of your reeds.
Open Windows
While the heart/tip connection is crucial, you can’t forget about the windows either! Vibrations can also become “clogged” if they come across too much cane in the back of your reed. Holding your reed up to a light again, check for how much light is getting through your windows. There should be a noticeable difference in the thickness of your spine and rails versus your windows. Just how transparent the windows need to be in comparison varies. If you tested each section as described earlier, and the tip and heart are vibrating well but not the back, check the look of the windows under the light and probably scrape there first before touching the spine or rails.
Avoid Ridges
Ridges are the indents you make on the reed when your knife accidentally digs into the cane instead of gliding smoothly over. These tend to happen in the windows when we are scraping a larger area. These ridges can get in the way of proper vibrations, so be careful to avoid them and make sure you scrape with a sharp knife and do not push down any hard than you have to (which really should not be hard at all. Sharpen your knife!)
Thick Spine and Rails
Generally, I would avoid scraping the spine or rails directly because they tend to get enough residual scraping. They are the skeleton to your oboe reed and you need them to be rigid and not let the reed go limp. However, it might not hurt to examine your spine and rails when a reed is very hard. If your scraping is becoming very precise, they may have been left too thick. If they are very visible on your reed, try to first gently slope them into the heart. Only if you are very sure they are far too thick, scrape directly on them a very little at a time till they allow for more vibrations. My spines tend to get thick, but the rails i almost never touch. It may be the opposite for you!
Lighten/Blend the Heart
Knowing how crucial the heart is on an oboe reed for a rich sound, sometimes the heart is neglected to the detriment of the whole reed. If you have very open windows and a very thin tip, but your reed is still stuffy (or you can’t vibrate the heart in the blow test), try to gently and slowly work on the heart. This is definitely in the “finishing touches” stage of an oboe reed. Initially start by scraping from the center of the heart at an angle towards each tip respectively. This scrapes the sides of the heart in a way that maintains the slope that was put in place before. Scrape very little amounts at a time and test in between to prevent yourself from going too far.
Try looking at your reed from the side. The two blades should slope away from each other into the heart and then back toward each other more subtly in the back. If the heart is very pronounced at this angle or more like a mountain peak than a smooth slope up and down, your heart is likely too thick to allow proper vibration. If you have left a very thick heart intact, some light scraping straight up through the center of the heart can sometimes work wonders for the responsiveness of a reed. Definitely scrape only very little amounts between testing!
Aim for Response Through the Whole Process
Check your reed’s response as you are making it. If you have just tied a reed, it is not a bad idea to thin the tip to a point that it is vibrating well before letting it dry. When you pull it out again it will have hardened. You should again not put that reed away until you have a good response – especially since all the parts of the reed are put in place at this stage of scraping. On your third day of scraping you again are checking for response. This should be easier to achieve because that has been the standard all along. It does not matter how in tune your reed is if it is too hard to play or stuffy sounding.
Better to Scrape Too Little
If your reeds are too hard or stuffy, that’s actually not the worst problem! You can always take more cane off, but you can’t put it back on! Scraping slowly and carefully may have given you an unresponsive reed, but scraping so much your reed has collapsed has no cure.
Final Advice
Reedmaking takes lots of practice, so keep at it! Whenever you have a reed that plays really well (especially one that you made!), study it closely and see if you can imitate the same tip length, window depth, etc. The more reedmaking you do the more you will get a feel for what works for you! Is there any other advice you have for how to make an oboe reed responsive?
To buy responsive oboe reeds, you can go to my shop!
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