My new friend asked if bassoonists make better kisses. I answered that yes, it’s possible, and how we work on certain embouchures. We hold our mouths just so, on the bassoon reeds.
If I went a while without playing, my muscle tone would be lost. After some days practice, my mouth would feel strong again.
I want to talk about bassoon reeds. They are / were expensive, double reeds, compared to the cheap clarinet, bass clarinet, and tenor sax reeds I would buy also, for when I was playing those instruments.
I got reeds from my teacher. But to buy a bassoon reed myself, I would ask the guy working at the music store, “Do you have any bassoon reeds?”
He would be an older white guy. He’d size me up and say, “I have some somewhere…” and open a desk drawer, to find a little box with some bassoon reeds in it. He would peer at them, saying, “We don’t get many bassoonists in here.” Arcane cane.
anatomy of a bassoon reed
A bassoon reed is two pieces of reed, curved, connected by some string. The string wraps around in a special way.
Different colors of thread, but mostly dark blue. I had a reed with red thread, but I think it was too hard. Sometimes I would paint the thread of a bassoon reed with glittery nailpolish, to easily differentiate reeds.
My bassoon teacher was a pro and had a kit for making his own reeds, and special tools, so he could amend my reeds, taking off a little cane to thin an area of a reed, or making the hole of a new reed bigger so it could fit better on my bocal.
I would have multiple reeds going at once. Usually a favorite reed, a backup reed, a weird reed I was not sure what to do with, a reed that cracked in an unfortunate way that I would keep around in hopes that magically it would heal? I guess that one was a Nostalgia reed.
fox in a box
In some box somewhere, I have a few bassoon reeds. The last time I played was when I rented a bassoon in 2013. I wanted to play again to join a punk rock orchestra in the Bay Area. That did not go well, and I never even auditioned.
I recall days of drooling over old bassoons on ebay, bidding on a few, never winning, not really having the money. I would think like, “That one is only $900! It looks ok! I could take it to the local shop and get the pads replaced. Not bad…” But they were actually thousands of dollars.
That was early days of internet for me, when I thought the internet was for email, looking at art, and drooling over bassoons on ebay.
Love to double reed players everywhere, bassoon makers, bassoon reed makers, grievers finding an old instrument in their parent’s attic and asking, “What the hell is this?”
