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Reeds by Holly

About Reed Making

If you watch a few YouTube clips on reedmaking, you see masters take a folded piece of cane, cut it into the shape of a reed, bind it to a hollow tube with thread, and scrape away the bark in 5 or 10 minutes, and make a reed that they can play for you. So what’s the big deal?

What you did not see was the several hours of cane selection from a box of tubes bought by the pound or kilo, or the hand splitting of these tubes with a splitting tool,and the hours spent microselecting to isolate the straightest sides. Neither did you see the jig-guillotining of these splits to the right lengths, carefullyeyeballing them for the the straightest segments and more guillotining to get to it. You don’t see those guillotined splits, dozens to several hundred in a sitting, being pushed through a pregouging bed or passed repeatedly across with a planer until it’s flat in the planing trough. Next, you don’t see the soaking the splits for as much as 1-3 days, depending on your personal philosophy, and then resoaking it again for at least 6-9 hours after drying it thoroughly over at least 24 hours, in order to gouge it to a perfectly regulated thickness with a machine that costs anywhere from $1500 to $2700. So far, that’s just cane selection and rough preparation.

Next comes shaping and folding, which the masters make look fast and easy, but what you don’t see, is that the slightest hint of too much pressure, or the cant of the wrist to one side can cause the razor blade to “wrap” in 10,000’s tolerance around the edge of the metal shaper tip causing a micro nick in the smooth edge of the shape, which causes a microleak when you bind and slip the blades against each other. That microleak makes a perfectly beautiful, responsive reed sometimes not responsive when the note is attacked, and can cause the reed to just stop in the middle of a note. It is a tiny mistake with big, scary consequences. Oh, you can buy machines that do this in a fixed jig system that will reliably avoid making this mistake every time, but you better set back another $3000 for that machine and shaper form.

And now, we get to the part where we scrape off the bark and make it vibrate. What you don’t see after the video clip stops, is what that reed sounds like after it is set aside to dry completely over the next 24 hours. It sounds like a board and feels worse. So, you resoak it, then you scrape all the areas you scraped the day before, making the reed thinner and easier to vibrate with less air. You tweak the blades, clip the tip several times to tune it to A=440, test it, play it a few minutes, then put it up. Tomorrow, you will repeat this process again, because it will be a little harder, and you may do it again the day after that. It depends on the cane, the weather, the barometric pressure, etc., but you keep drying it overnight and rescraping it until it quits changing into Mr. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll every time you pull it out of the reed case the next day. When the “creature” is vanquished, then you can sell it as a “finished” reed. Or you can rush the process and sell some poor soul “the creature” instead of the good Dr. Jekyll.

That’s why it takes so long.