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June 17, 2005
Altitude Adjustment, Part II
It turns out that the bassoon is, in reality, a very sophisticated pressure-sensing device. When pressure drops, any given reed "seems" more resistant to the player, since for an equivalent muscle power input, less actual pressure is generated (as ambient pressure is lower). I can confirm, therefore, that I am in fact at quite high altitude, as my "Aspen special" reeds appear to be working as designed.* This makes situation number three considerably less likely.
*The theory behind their design is this. Any reed that works at sealevel will play very, very sharp (30-50 cents) at altitude. One needs a weaker reed. One can obtain said weaker reed by whittling away at a "normal" reed until it is paper-thin, but this has unfortunate drawbacks. To begin with, it makes them fragile and so they don't last as long, and the thinness also has undesireable effects on tone quality.
An improved method is to use softer cane. Unfortunately, softer cane in general is often not as "good" as hard cane, which is to say that it doesn't respond as well to adjustment and doesn't like to keep its form. It turns out that the biological structure of reed cane is such that the harder, more springy (and hence more resistant) fibers are nearer to the bark (the bark itself, of course, being most springy and resistant of all). To make my "Aspen special" reeds, then, I gouged cane thicker, so that when it was profiled (that is, the bark taken away from the blade area of the reed via a machine that's sort of like a lathe), the blade would be comprised of those softer fibers further from the bark. This has the nice effect of weakening the reed evenly overall, but leaving enough material intact that the cane retains longevity and luster of tone. Or so it works in theory....
Posted by David Richmond at June 17, 2005 9:48 PM EDT
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Comments
you should send karen this post. :)
Posted by: emily at June 19, 2005 6:42 PM