Richard Kilmer is famously known to say, “Reedmaking is simple. Just scrape away all the wood that isn’t supposed to be there.” You gotta love him! He’s just brilliant, and he’s a sweetheart of a man. But, he’s also right. It eventually gets easier to remove the right wood everytime, IF you keep your knife sharp and select your cane for consistency.
To feel comfortable with your knife, consistency in your knife sharpening is a must. Read the page on [Sharpening the Reed Knife]. Your control of angles and pressures depend on good knife sharpening technique. If the knife feels dull, the temptation is to push down. This is a mistake! You are gouging and crushing the microtubules in the cane, and this shows up as “tip noise,” chirps, whistles, hisses that make the reed sound ugly even when it responds just fine. Your knife handling is greatly affected by how you refine and shape the burr.
There are two concepts about the burr you need to understand. Imagine a frayed line of steel particles being pushed out beyond the edge of the blade by friction with the stone. You are dragging a trail of steel particles out onto the thin edge. The rough stones make this happen quickly, but they tear away large, coarse particles from the blade. The smoother water stones, India stones, lapping paper, and knife steels organize these coarse steel particles by knocking off particles that are too big and aligning the smaller ones along the blade’s edge. This makes the burr compact and smooth. Then, we tilt the knife up at an angle and flex this burr toward the front surface of the knife. This bending of the burr is where the knife receives its manifesto to scrape. The quality of the sorting and compacting of the particles accomplished during the refining of the burr has everything to do with how smoothly the knife finishes the reed tip. Smooth, uniform particles yield smooth-surfaced tips.
The second concept you need to understand is sharpening angle, that is, how far the burr is bent forward determines where in the swing of the knife the blade begins to remove cane. The more you tilt the blade up while setting the burr, the more you bend the burr forward, and the more upright you must hold the knife to scrape cane without cutting of snagging it on the surface of the cane. Bend it too far forward and either the knife won’t scrape at all because you will collapse the burr against the front surface of the knife. Bend it too little, and the knife may only scrape with the knife tilted backwards of vertical. Bend the burr just right and it begins scraping somewhere close to vertical. You can see it start scraping as the edge comes into sight beneath the spine of the blade, and it scrapes all the way through the forward swing evenly and feels controlled. Now, here’s the thing, some people like to scrape with their knife tilted forward or backward of vertical because that feels right to them. So, everyone sharpens their knife differently. What works for me will probably be different from what works for you, because it’s all a matter of feel. Practice on different knives bending the burr at different angles until you find what feels good. Do not try different angles on the same knife! You will only round of the edge in a hodge-podge of half-finished angles, and the knife will have to be reground to restore the original facing. It will be unsharpenable without it.
After you have mastered the sharpening of your knife, your way, you must develop consistency in the motion of your hand. Get the reed nestled in your free hand, and your thumb lightly planted behind the spine of the knife to brace it fulcrum-style and swing it like a pendulum for large heavy scraping strokes, as in debarking the backs of reeds. To blend the back and plateau (heart), or to blend the front of the plateau into the back of the tip, or to finish a tip, you must switch to pushing the knife forward like a razor sanding device, not swinging it pendulum style, but keeping it in your preferred stationary angle position, while you pull the reed back into the palm of your hand, simultaneously, to give your push a longer length of travel. Yes, it’s awkward at first. But, as you practice this stationary-blade technique, you will notice the knife scrapes the same amount of cane off all along the length of the push, because you’re using the same scraping angle all the way through. This is the only way to finish a buttery-feeling, perfectly quiet tip! You cannot use the pendulum motion of the knife to scrape a quiet tip. You also cannot get the fine control that you need for finishing the tip unless the last inch or so of you knife blade is very sharp, so pay special attention to the tip of the knife while sharpening.
Over-scraping a place on the reed is one of the most vexing mistakes and very common. You will do it a lot before you master the feel of scraping with a reed knife. Remember, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it and store-bought reeds would all sound wonderful. You, on the other hand, are going to patiently learn a very special skill that makes you one of an elite, small group of craftsmen. So, get your knife out and try it again, and again, and again. Get help from a teacher, and don’t quit. It will pay off sometime in the future, bigtime!