Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[TomB-R]

I put new reeds in a little old grey Double Ray.  Lots was learned along the way (I think,) and I was very chuffed to find the thing playable!  After that initial excitement I found whilst playing that the speed of response felt just a bit uneven.

Okay, next learning stage, that's fine, but how to measure or assess the unevenness?

What seemed to work was playing repeated notes, two fingers on a button as fast as possible, press or draw.
On most buttons I found I could get a nice fast "stutter" and doing this seemed to highlight the slow ones quite nicely.

Is this a good method or are there better ways? Is it likely to be leading me astray in any way?
Cheers
Tom

[RGF]

I've got in the habit of taking a two-part approach for each individual reed. First, I will press the button and then very gently begin to draw (or compress) the bellows. In a quite room, with my ear towards the box, I listen for audible "breath sounds" that might occur before the reed starts to sound. If this is the case, I lower the reed tongue a bit towards the plate to get it to sound sooner. Part two is to apply a fairly good pull on the bellows, and then attack the button -- if it chokes, or does not sound, I raise the reed tongue a bit higher relative to the plate so it doesn't get sucked down into the aperture and freeze there. Someplace in the middle there is (usually) a position that will somewhat satisfy both tests.

Maybe not ideally "zeroed in" for a certain style of playing, i.e. mostly loud or mostly quiet, but it seems to work for me. Bear in mind that I'm a beginner at this, and better advice might come along any instant!

Bob in Minnesota

[rees]

Spot on description Bob. It takes a bit of practice to find that sweet spot and quite a lot of time and patience.

You do need peace and quiet though and take extra care with the smaller reeds