Experiments with Reeds

The first "reeds" I tried using were nothing more than slips cut from recycle-grade-6 plastic, in my case from a bright blue box of cheap baby-wipes. To cut, I hold the mouthpiece against a flat section of the box and mark its outline with a pen. When I cut it out, I leave a "tail" at the base which makes tying the reed to the mouthpiece easier and gives it better stability.

The mouthpiece is just a hunk of pipe cut off at an angle and smoothed. Tying the reed on with string or yarn (like SugarBelly Walker did) is too tricky. A really wide, thick rubber band works great. I get mine off of bundles of broccoli from the supermarket. In general, the binding should only go a third of the way up the reed, leaving two thirds of its length over the mouthpiece hole free to vibrate. It doesn't matter much if the rest of the reed sticks out below unless it's getting in the way or catching on stuff.

Tuning was done much the same as for my flutes, with a couple of differences. First, holes were significantly smaller. They seemed to be more affected by position than by diameter. Second, a straight-bore reed instrument needs ten holes instead of just six.

The sound of the smaller instruments are brash and the pitch is extremely sensitive to embouchure changes. The larger instrument was more stable and far more mellow. With a standard alto saxophone reed from the music store, the sound was identical to a clarinet but with a slightly higher pitch. These reed instruments allowed me a very wide dynamic range, from whisper quiet to louder than I can shout. (Maybe because I had 6 years of playing clarinet?) If using a plastic reed, the tone of the larger instrument can be varied by how one bites from a clarinet-like tone to something much like a soprano saxophone.

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