I was cleaning out my desk the other day and came across my whole collection of Monumental Reed Notes. The collection is actually just a stack of Post-It-Notes from my years of study with Richard Killmer at Eastman.

I thought I would share some of them with you.

• Don’t worry about the detail… at first. Get the reed playing. Make it a stable, functioning reed and then worry about putting on the decorations.
• Learn to make reeds quickly. Don’t caress the cane. Just get the job done… Make a reed and play it.
• Reeds don’t play the oboe, you do. Having a great reed isn’t the end, it is just the beginning. The reed is a tool, you are the musician. You are responsible for what you sound like.

It’s always fun to travel to festivals and gigs out of town, but it can make for unpredictable reeds. Planning ahead for multiple scenarios with a case full of gorgeous reeds is the ideal situation, but how realistic is it to make a reed in one city and expect it to be the same somewhere else? I’m back in Chicago now after spending 5 days in Nashville and am headed to Northern Wisconsin next week for the Midsummer Music Festival. My traveling reed plan for a week away is usually to leave with about 6 blanks, a few rough-scraped reeds, and a couple cushy old reeds (the old reeds give me some wiggle room to have a selection of reeds to play for a day or two while I make up a batch of reeds (around 5 or 6) when I arrive. You can never fully plan for what you’ll encounter in a new place, but I’ve found that traveling with a selection of new and old reeds and blanks to work with keeps my options open!

Playing the oboe is hard enough as it is, so I try to keep my reed philosophy as simple as possible. I believe there are only a few things that make a good reed. The rest, as they say, is just opinion.

A good reed must have:

• response – if it doesn’t make a sound, what good is it?
• stability – using words like integrity and down-to-earth seem a bit philosophical, but if the shoe fits…

Everything else about a reed grows out of these two things. Pitch, of course, is relative. After all, what good is a reed that is “right-on” in terms of pitch if everyone else in the ensemble is playing sharp? Who loses in that situation (besides the listeners)?

Reeds can be complicated animals, but when you really get to the heart (pun intended) of what makes a reed great, it’s actually quite simple.