USING A CURVED COLLAR ON BASSOON REEDS
Gary Echols,
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
For the past year or so, I've been using a curved
collar on a lot of my reeds, which seems to help the problem of a sharp low
register and/or the loss of the high register where you fix the low.
I leave a collar of 2 or 3 mm (more if possible), then
(if necessary) curve it with an exacto blade, leaving 2-3 mm in the center and
no collar in the corner next to the wire.
This has much the same effect as removing the entire
collar on the low register and has very little effect on the high register. Or,
to put it another way, the highs vibrate on a blade that is 2/3 mm shorter than
that for the lows. I certainly wouldn't say this is an original idea, but I'm
not aware of anyone using it at the moment.
Knochenhauer used the opposite type of curved collar,
but most people seem to think this was not significant of just a decoration. Günter
Angerhöfer showed me a reed with this type of collar by Georg Junge (1968) who
studied with Knochenhauer. Günter didn't think it was important.
Anyway, this has helped me quite a bit and perhaps some
other people would be able to use it.
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