Brains and Membranes

Bassoon Reed Making

by Christopher Millard

For the aspiring bassoonist a good reed is an incalculably valuable treasure.  Will it last a week?  A day?  You pray it remains faithful.  Life gets busy and you struggle to find the hours at your reed desk.  Next week’s lesson, next month’s orchestra concert, tomorrow night’s wind quintet, all loom ahead.  Every time you place a reed on a bocal you expect disaster.  You wonder if you’ll ever be able to simply make music.

Those of us who make a living at this have a hard time explaining to our families and friends just how problematic and time consuming this reed making business is.

The young bassoonist learns reed making mostly by imitation.  We follow the instructions of our teachers, using specific dimensions and steps.  We struggle forward using trial and error and without much in the way of guiding principles.  It’s an empirical craft rather than a theoretical study.

In the following pages – Brains and Membranes – I’m going to tell you about my own pursuit of a different way of thinking.  By introducing you to some physics based ideas I hope I can save you at least a few hours of grief.

This is not an instruction manual, but rather an attempt to sketch a big picture of the complex relationship between reeds and bassoons.

Chapter 1 – Starting Down The Path

Sol Schoenbach was a brilliant man who spoke with clarity and forethought, but never spoon-fed his students!  There was a Zen Master quality to him at times

Rather quickly I became convinced he was tossing a simplistic hypothesis my way, expecting I would pursue further investigation and makes some sense of it all.

Schoenbach’s own reed-making history was rather modest.  He told me how he had gone to Germany after WWII to study with the legendary reed maker Mechler, that on the first day he cut his thumb badly with a reed knife and immediately decided that this was not how he wanted to spend his life!  This sounded a bit apocryphal, but like most orchestral principals of his era he certainly had reeds made for him by others for most of his career.

During my first year of study with Schoenbach  he sent me to up to a little fishing village on the Maine coast to spend a week with the reed maker and pedagogue Louis Skinner.

Skinner, who was the most loving and gentle man you could imagine, got me organized.  He showed me how to improve my skills with tools, gave me some clear ideas about designs, measurements and techniques, and imparted some basic ideas about reed acoustics.  During subsequent visits to Skinner, my techniques and outcomes improved, but I can’t say that I came to a satisfying understanding of the underlying mysteries of reeds and bassoon.

Lou was a master craftsman who guided many of my generation to a more systematic approach to their reed making.

At the heart of Skinner’s thinking was this: you built a ‘tuned’ reed to make your bassoon play efficiently.  A properly tuned reed is responsive, not too sharp and not too flat with an attractive sound.

In our very first conversation about the principles of reed making, he defined the bassoon reed as a ‘tuned oscillator’.

Lou always began with a simple test – putting his lips over the first wire and blowing very lightly.  He was listening for a particular ‘peeping’ frequency, which might range from a D to a G.  Each player would gravitate towards a peeping note best suited to his instrument, reed style and physical approach.  His protocol implied that reeds are fixed pitch tone generators.

Skinner was very clear that he associated the basic ‘peeping’ pitch* of the reed with its dimensions; longer reeds had a lower basic frequency and shorter reeds higher.  For example, a reed that measured 28 mm from first wire to tip might sound a D, a reed that measured 27 mm should sound an Eb, and so on.  Of course, this was just a guide, and it turns out that for many players a 28 mm reed producing a D natural is too flat. Although he was initially quite firm about following specific length/pitch rules, Skinner certainly understood that the peeping pitches were dependent on many variables.

*”Peeping pitch’ is the simplest tone you can make by placing the lips over the first wire and blowing lightly.

What Skinner didn’t give was an explanation of the actual physical processes that happen when you attach a reed to a bocal.

If you stop there, you’re left with this: the reed sounds a specific fundamental frequency, you slap this onto the bocal, magic happens, and out of the other end comes the Jolivet Concerto.  A fixed pitch oscillator produces all the notes on the bassoon. It is a simple and appealing concept.  

So, here I was early in my career viewing the behaviour of reeds in a very uni-directional way.

I was very grateful to Skinner for his very organized pedagogy.  It got me building reeds with good structure and some solid guidelines about how to make them function consistently.  He offered some intriguing methods for enhancing reed behaviour via gouge alterations.  But I had a nagging sense that I didn’t have a real understanding about how it all worked.  

Against all odds, I ended up winning a first bassoon chair when I was 22.  I was thrilled but often miserable.  I wasn’t ready as a musician and I had no confidence in my reed making.  I was convinced I would not earn my tenure in the orchestra. So, during my first seasons I spent 4 or 5 hours a day at the reed bench – even more than I had done as a student.  Somehow, my older colleagues took pity on me and decided that I would eventually improve so I did get past probation.  I also became more and more determined to live more hours of my life away from the damn reed desk.

Skinner had been a great help in giving me grounding, but I knew it was time to learn something deeper about reeds and about woodwind instruments.  I bought the important books on acoustics, Benade, Backus, Nederveen.  Something you should know…I have poor math skills and don’t do well with equations.  Yet I gradually built a concept – a visualization if you will – of HOW the system works.  It starts with basic reviews about sound, about compression, frequency, amplitude.  The words are slightly intimidating at first, but these writers were very good at explaining things.  I had one simple reed goal from the very beginning: increase my success rates and spend less time making reeds.  Presumably you are reading this with the same goal in mind.  

You will be asking “Will some knowledge about acoustics really have a positive effect on my reed making?”  Over the years I have found many students skeptical about this.  It’s cane.  Some reeds work, some don’t.  Deal with it.

But it turns out that some basic understanding of how reeds and bassoons work together can go a long way to improving the consistency of your work.

If you are looking for answers, you need to ask good questions.  In the following chapters I’ll try and do just that.

Chapter 2 – It’s a Simple Question

Chapter 1 – Starting Down The Path  Chapter 2 – It’s A Simple Question? Chapter 3 – Surf’s up! Chapter 4 – The Physicist’s Viewpoint Chapter 5 – The Big :Picture Chapter 6 – We’ll huff and we’ll puff… Chapter 7 – Look Both Ways Chapter 8 – Dialogue Chapter 9 – The Big Bounce Chapter 10 – The Incredible Shrinking Bassoonist Chapter 11 – A Useful Equation  Chapter 12 – Goldilocks’ Dilemma Chapter 13 – Stairway to Heaven Chapter 14 – Reed MyLipsChapter 15 – Resonance Chapter 16 – Corvids & Cacks Chapter 17 –   Chickens and Eggs Chapter 18 – Chiaroscuro  Chapter 19 – Donuts​ Chapter 20 – Balance