NOD - Oh Boy Oboe!

Is that a bass oboe?

 

Oboe: The only instrument that can make an audience pray for bagpipes.

 

I love the sound of the oboe. I played one for a few days in Jr High. Just wasn't for me though - stuck with my main instrument.

What are you doing for the double reed? If you are just getting started on it, I'm assuming you just bought one. If you stick with it you might want to learn how to craft your own reeds. I always thought that was such a cool aspect of double reed instruments - that people carve their own mouthpieces.

 

Oh man!
The only thing more intense than the lovely sound of a well-played oboe is the difficulty in achieving the wind control necessary to play. I love the oboe.

But there is a reason why the oboe has a reputation for being the most challenging wind instrument to play. It is fiendishly difficult to play well.

Double reeds are just wild.

 

I think you already sound pretty good! Practice to build up those embouchure muscles will improve the steadiness of your tones. Holding a steady oboe tone is like balancing something on a knife edge. Keep it up!

 

I bought an oboe back in the 70's and quickly found out that in order to play an oboe you need a bunch of reed making tools and supplies. You can't really buy an oboe reed -- well you can buy a basic, student reed but they are expensive and aren't really any good - you really have to make your own. And even once I got a decent reed, I still just couldn't get used to how you can't blast thru it like you can on sax - you have to gently coax the tone out of the thing. But I sure love to hear them when played by someone who can - I was always a big fan of the band "Oregon" with Ralph Towner and Paul McCandless etc. And of course whenever I hear the rite of spring it always makes me want to play an oboe and/or a bassoon.

 

Oboe: The only instrument that can make an audience pray for bagpipes.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DO NOT PUT anything to the public until you are proficient

 

Well, that’s one heck of a lot better than what I could do, I’m sure of that... keep it up!

 

Come on now... if that’s how you want it then you need to reach out and tell about fifty million others to stop posting their material. I say more power to him

 

Nut width?

 

DON'T DO IT!!!!!!!!!! (says the husband of an oboe/English horn player)

 

There's a dark path to evil (knives, stones, splitters, gougers, growing your own...). I have to bite my tongue and not make "duck jokes" when my wife is in reed making mode.

 

Weight?

 

All I can think of when I see that is that wood could have made a nice fretboard.

 

This reminds of a friend of mind who was running errands in town and he had his oboe in the back seat. He stopped at the bank, and while he was standing in line he suddenly realized he'd left his window down. In a panic he rushed back out his car, but it was too late... there were already 3 more oboes thrown into the car.

 

Congrats! The double reed professor at my university back in the day (mid 90's) was Dr. Dan Ross. He invented the Ross gouging machine back in the 80's for reed making and was apparently pretty well known globally for his efforts. Some say that every major orchestra in the country has at least one of the machines, although I'm not sure how true that is anymore.

He was also good friends with Paul Klipsch & his family so all of the speakers in the band/choir rooms and auditoriums were Klipsch (naturally) and I think most of them were probably donated. My friends & I would often play music over the audio system when a room wasn't in use, and got told more than a few times to turn it down by the faculty LOL.

Dan sadly passed away late last year after a battle with cancer, and I think that he was still teaching up to that point. He was a great player, educator and human. His son, Phillip, is the associate principal oboist of the St. Louis Symphony and has carried on the business of making reed gouging machines.

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Didn't mean to ramble but your oboe post brought back some good memories that I thought might be interesting. Good luck with the new axe!