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The Complete Handbook of Bassoon Reeds
A practical field guide for players, repairers, and retailers who want to understand, select, and maintain bassoon reeds with confidence
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: Understanding Bassoon Reeds
A bassoon reed is not a simple accessory. It is the single most variable and most influential component of the entire instrument. The instrument itself - a folded tube of maple nearly eight feet long - produces a distinct, dark timbre only because the reed delivers air into it in a very specific way. If the reed is too soft, too hard, unbalanced, or poorly profiled, the sound is affected immediately and drastically. A professional player can adjust to many things: a different bocal, a cold room, an unfamiliar hall. But an unplayable reed stops a performance before it begins.
To understand what a bassoon reed actually is, you need to strip away the romanticism. It is a carefully shaped piece of Arundo donax, a species of giant cane that grows primarily in southern France, Spain, and parts of South America. The cane is harvested, dried for one to two years, then cut into tubes. Those tubes are split, gouged to a specific thickness, shaped, profiled, and finally tied onto a metal tube called a staple. The result is a double reed: two blades of cane that vibrate against each other when air is forced between them and the player's lips provide the necessary resistance.
What makes the bassoon reed different from, say, a clarinet reed or a saxophone reed is that it is a double reed. There is no single flat piece of cane vibrating against a mouthpiece. Instead, two blades meet at a