fiberreeds

[sxpoet]

https://fiberreed.de/en/blattstaerken-vergleichstabelle/

[Jeff]

Hi James, so are you going to buy a full set of five? Or just the Hemp reed for the darkest tone?

[sxpoet]

I’ve ordered a D’addario synthetic VENN reed, which i shall try out on my Dark mouthpiece. The hemp reed isn’t suited for dark classical mouthpieces according to Hartmann’s website, but they do have two other reeds suitable for classical music.

I tried several Hartmann reeds on my Bright metal mouthpiece and they just didn’t work for me, so i hope i haven’t wasted money on the VENN reed. It’s not a big deal anyway, The D’addario Plasticover reeds seems to work on my dark mouthpiece, i’ve got one of them and i’ll test it out further this week. The Plasticover reeds also work well on clarinets.

[Jeff]

James, how do the clarinet reeds compare to the alto sax reeds? Wider or longer?
The clarinet ligature is working well on my alto MP, but I had to get a soprano lig for the Alto H2O MP.
I have a friend who works on lathes, he gave me a short piece of a broken cutting tool steel, and that also works for leveling and shaping reeds as they have sharp hard corners just like the Reed Geek.

[Jeff]

I’ve just had a look at the Venn synthetic price and it’s the same as seven cane reeds. It will have to be very good to beat seven Vandoren reeds.

[sxpoet]

clarinet reeds are not as wide as alto reeds, you’re thinking more of the barrel shape of the dark mouthpieces being the same ligature size for both instruments.

i ordered two more VENN synthetic D’addario reeds, a no 2.5 and a no 3, i know the 2.5’s work perfectly, i need to try a 3 reed to see of it gets a stronger altissimo sound.

If you’re interested in buying a D’addario VENN reed, i wouldn’t know what strength to tell you to buy, my rule of thumb was to get a strength slightly lower than the strongest D’addario cane reed that i play on.

[Jeff]

Hi James, you have me wondering about how the H2O would sound with a Venn synthetic.
I would probably go for the #2 as I’m actually playing a #1 Vandoren right now.
Perhaps when I can move back to my #2 reeds, then I’ll acquire one for a little light research 😉

[sxpoet]

Hi Jeff, which vandoren are you playing, as they all are different in how quick or how slow they respond (the difference between playing a slow funeral song and a quick marching song – onward christian soldiers).

The difference in reed design type will be better suited to either one of those tempos and not both of them, and both reeds will sound good but respond differently. So wrong choice of reed makes it slightly harder to control which song you pick when you blow.

You can get a reed design which will slightly cross over and allow you to play both songs, but it wont sound as good as the specific reed designed for one of those songs. They tend to be reeds advertised as good for classical and good for jazz.

Choice of reed strength, will determine how quick your lip embouchure turns to jelly.
A reed too hard that you are not used to will be too hard to play a slow funeral song as you will run out of breath very quickly, and it will be even even much harder to play a marching song that starts and stops quickly as you need a lot sharp forceful breaths.

A softer reed in any design, will be very easy to play both songs, great for beginners.

The reason i don’t play on softer softer reeds has nothing to do with the sound, it’s because after 10 minutes the reeds gets softer with saliva, and then becomes impossible to control properly, whereas the proper harder strength reed behaves itself for an hour of playing. But the problem with playing a harder reed slows down how quick you can get the reed to respond to quick note changes – this is where it is better for me to use a reed that is designed to either respond quickly or slowly, that way i can still play a harder strength reed which wont give out on after 10 minutes of blowing.

[sxpoet]

i can’t advice you which type of reed to pick as your mouthpiece is different to mine, how they respond on mine will different to how they respond on yours.

best bet is to test all the different reeds, should be easier for you, as you can just buy all No. 1 reeds without having to work out which strength to go for.

When i tested all 6 D’adario reeds because of the differences in response it made some reeds sound in the wrong song mood (being too lively as they responded to quickly), and that had nothing to do with reed strength

[sxpoet]

fail to prepare results in being prepared to fail.

[Author]

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