Oboe Reed Enginering

On a Tuesday night hike, I started ranting about how the Oboe is the most engineering-like in the construction of its reed and how the reed can drastically change the timbre.

In this part, I'll mention a little bit about oboe reed construction. The timbre aspect is equally fascinating but that will be done separately.

Here is how an oboe reed is scraped in the style developed by Marcel Tabuteau and John Delancie around  1948-1951. 

Here is a back-lit image of this kind of reed.  Oboists who use this style of scrape, do hold the reed up to the light like this to see what's up.

In Tabeteau's reeds, the spine down the middle did not exist. However it is now generally added since it makes the read more sturdy.

This style is now popular; it has changed the oboe sound in the U.S. This style and sound then spread to Australia, Japan and Asia, Latin America, England (after a longer delay), and many countries. France and Germany are more steeped in their own traditions and styles and of sound,  so the spread there is less than in Europe.

Here is an image of the "French" style which was almost universally used before 1948:

The image is from Regency Reeds, a seller of oboe reeds from England. There generally is not a backlit view of these kinds of reeds because there is no need to. However, here is a diagram comparing the two

from https://oboewan.com/index.php/about-oboe-reeds/. 

Now here is a back-lit image of a slightly larger oboe used mostly in the Baroque period, called the Oboe d'amore: 

It uses the American scrape, so it is probably used on a modern instrument. The Oboe d'amore is slightly larger and is in A rather than C.  It is a transposing instrument. The current modern Oboe's lowest note goes down to Bb so you might wonder what's the big deal. But in the Baroque period, the Oboes went down only to middle C. And since they had only three keys (where one key was a symmetric duplicate of the other so one could play the instrument with the left hand or the right hand in the upper position), playing in a key like A major (and closely related keys) sounded very different when played on an Oboe in C instead of an Oboe tuned in A.

Now compare this reed with the reed for the smaller Baroque Oboe of the kind used back in the 18th century when the oboe was first developed from an older instrument called the "Shawm": 

The Baroque Oboe is made of a softer wood -  boxwood instead of the harder grenadilla wood or plastic. And the bore of a Baroque Oboe is larger than its modern counterpart, so there is less air pressure on the player and there is more airflow that passes through the instrument.

Notice that as is the custom with the Oboe d'amore, English Horn (in F), or Bassson, there is no cork on the metal part or "staple". This reed is a little bit larger and wider than an oboe. So it is more forgiving than a modern oboe d'amore reed, which is more forgiving than a modern oboe reed.

You'll see that the baroque version in C is about the same size or larger. It is wider or more V-shaped at the tip that goes into the mouth. Also, no cork is on the staple.

Compare the oboe reed with a bassoon reed:

See how the bassoon reed is much wider and the cane portion down to the string portion is about twice as long. The bassoon plays about an octave lower than the oboe.

This means that tolerances are larger and can be more forgiving. It is influenced less by lip mass. The scrape is the French style. Typically there is a wire that can control the aperture of the reed opening as well as help to keep air from coming out the sides. Since there is less pressure, it is less likely to occur on the bassoon. One of the French-scrape Oboe reeds above also has a wire. Wires are typically frowned upon because, at the scale of oboe size, it can interfere with the tone. Moreso for American scrapes than the French scrape where there is more cane bark near the wire. But for a commercial maker such as this English firm, it is more practical to ensure there is no air leaking from the side.

About the cork on the staple. In modern oboes, there is a cylindrical reed well: 

from Yamaha's the Oboe: double reed mechanism. 

In the modern Oboe, not inserting the reed cork completely to the bottom of the well will cause a break in the conical bore wind flow at a place of higher pressure where it is more critical to change sound production. So, in contrast to most other instruments, you can't or don't "tune" the modern instrument other than what you can do by "lipping" the note up or down. (Lipping down is easier than up.) The oboe's inflexibility in tuning is one of the reasons the orchestra tunes to the oboe. (The oboist tunes the instrument by making the reed length and scrape so the pitch comes out correct.)

Other instruments of the orchestra are inflexible too, like keyboard instruments and tuned percussion instruments (xylophone and chimes). When the keyboard instrument is a soloist like in a concerto, the orchestra tunes to that instrument. However since xylophone and chimes are rare minor instruments, those are not used for tuning even though they are inflexible as well. (The oboe's clear or perhaps "piercing" sound also makes it good to tune to).