The dreaded Reed Slump

They say that we learn from our mistakes, more than from our successes. I sure hope so.

From time to time, every oboist/reedmaker goes through a slump, wherein she can't seem to make a decent reed no matter how she tries. And, like a baseball slugger whose season average has dropped below .100, it feels like it lasts forever - even if it's only been a few days.

I'm just pulling myself out of one these slumps right now. It lasted about 2 weeks, since before the Oregon Symphony went to New York. Fortunately, I had enough good reeds to carry me through (one of the benefits of A Reed A Day.) But during that trip, and for a week afterwards, no piece of cane that I scraped was any good.

In an earlier point in my development as a reedmaker, a slump like this would find me tying up reed after reed, changing some one variable with each attempt. I would try other cane, a different gouge, another shape, different staples (the little cork covered metal tubes on which we tie the cane.) Hell, I even tried different color thread in my desperation, hoping somehow that Green thread would make better reeds than Magenta. And when none of that had the slightest benefit, I would resort to threats, curses, prayers, and sacrifices to the Great Reed God.

Then, a colleague of mine mentioned that 90% of the time his reed slumps were the fault of his knife. Not sharp enough. Or the wrong kind of edge to it.

Bingo. Ever since then, my reed slumps have been less frequent, and less severe. Notice that I don't say that never happen anymore. After all, I just had another one.

Why? Didn't I know how to sharpen one of these straight razors by now? Oh sure, I got my knife to feel sharp enough (testing its edge on my thumbnail.) But somehow that quality of that edge just wasn't doing it for me.

Then I remembered: the tool that I use most often for sharpening my knives - a ceramic 'stone' - needs to be cleaned once in a while. So I did.

All better.

The point to all this? That I made this very same mistake some years ago, and thought I had learned my lesson. Well, I did learn my lesson, I just forgot it.

So here's to learning from our mistakes. And here's to not having to re-learn the same lessons.