Posts in Reed Making

Finished Cane
September 2, 2013

An Inexpensive Cane Scoring Tool

Scor­ing is the process of cut­ting a num­ber of par­al­lel ver­ti­cal lines in the bark a piece of gouged, shaped, and pro­filed cane. These cuts make it eas­i­er to form the cane into a cylin­dri­cal tube and help pre­vent crack­ing dur­ing the form­ing process. Dif­fer­ent reed mak­ers have var­i­ous the­o­ries of scor­ing, involv­ing dif­fer­ent num­bers, spac­ing, length, and depth of score marks. There is also quite a vari­ety of tools one can choose from to actu­al­ly per­form the scor­ing, rang­ing from a sim­ple util­i­ty knife to Rieger’s quite expen­sive scor­ing machine. The tool I have used for years is close […]
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A clear plastic bassoon reed case holding seven reeds
April 17, 2013

The $3 Bassoon Reed Case

Note: the cost of mate­ri­als was rough­ly $3 when I first pub­lished this in 2013. As of 2023, it’s more like $4. Still cheap!  I have a num­ber of nice reed cas­es: a leather-cov­ered three-reed case that came with my bas­soon, a nine-reed wood­en case by Wise­man, and a cou­ple of beau­ti­ful maple cas­es by Roger Gar­rett. But I always seem to need more lit­tle box­es for trans­port­ing reeds for stu­dents, stash­ing French or peri­od bas­soon reed, or just to hold over­flow from my oth­er cas­es. My go-to for this sort of thing is the tried-and-true Altoids tin. But Altoids tins […]
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July 30, 2012

My Daily Tool Kit

Note: This post is from 2012, and I’ve changed quite a few things in my tool kit since then. Some of the spe­cif­ic tools I show here seem to no longer be avail­able, so I’ve removed the links. If there’s some­thing in par­tic­u­lar that you’d like to find, drop me a line. I have a ton of tools and sup­plies for mak­ing reeds, but I don’t need all of them every day. I keep a stream­lined set of tools in my bas­soon case for the dai­ly busi­ness of fin­ish­ing and adjust­ing reeds. I’ve spent a good deal of time fig­ur­ing […]
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January 25, 2012

Harvesting Cane

The day before the 2012 Meg Quigley Vival­di Com­pe­ti­tion and Bas­soon Sym­po­sium start­ed, Stock­ton Sym­pho­ny con­tra­bas­soon­ist Lar­ry Rhodes (shown at right with San Fran­cis­co Sym­pho­ny con­tra­bas­soon­ist Steve Braun­stein) led a small group of us on a cane har­vest­ing expe­di­tion. Giant cane (Arun­do don­ax), which we bas­soon­ists use to make our reeds, is clas­si­fied as an inva­sive pest in Cal­i­for­nia. It tends to grow in streams or marshy areas, and is pri­mar­i­ly prop­a­gat­ed by pieces float­ing along water­ways and tak­ing root in new loca­tions. The area sur­round­ing Stock­ton, most of which is part of the San Joaquin Riv­er Delta, is host […]
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