Had a great lesson this morning with Mr. Sorton, played Barrett stuff. Practiced, hung out with Carlos in his shop and watched him do stuff to oboes. I really need to do some experimenting with my oboe, take it apart and put it back together and adjust it and whatnot. Some real hands-on stuff. Hopefully I'll have time for that next week when I am home! That'll definitely be a good experience to write about in here...
Reed class was pretty epic today. I finished ten reeds. Of course, I'll have to readjust them all tomorrow, but heck, that is a lot of reeds. I've never made so many reeds in one day (of course, they were all the blanks I had tied yesterday, so I wasn't exactly starting from scratch). And they were all pretty darn good. I don't know what happened. All through this school year, I needed Prof Hauser to be finishing my reeds - I could hardly ever play on a reed he hadn't worked on, even if it was only a little bit. Then, after being home about a week and a half, I literally woke up one day in the middle of May and discovered I could make reeds really well. Apparently this is what happens. And I am thankful it did. I think it has something to do with my gouge being a little funny this last semester, so when I finally had a good gouge, the improvement in my scraping suddenly became drastically evident. Not complaining at all.
So no one really wanted that much detail about my reeds. Haha, sorry.
I can't wait to go home, sleep in my own bed, make reeds out by the pool, practice all day! Hooray! It's really been a fantastic six weeks of travel, festivals, and institutes though. I'm so happy that this summer turned out the way it did. :)
how much can you take apart your oboe? like the keys and stuff come off I assume? I never really thought about it for winds, except I hear you can take them apart to give them a bath. wait, that's just horns / brass. In Vienna my clarinetist friend was looking for a new thumbpiece. I assume you can kind of customize your wind instrument with different pieces and keys? that could be really cool.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the keys all come off! I personally haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to sometime in the next week. Well yeah, you can only bathe brass...I have bathed a french horn before. It is pretty fun.
ReplyDeleteYeah, you can customize to a certain extent. thumb rests you can adjust to be higher or lower. people adjust intonation of particular notes by widening or making smaller different tone holes. but you have to be careful, because changing the size of one tone hole can affect multiple notes. it's all about balance.