Robert Probasco is on the faculty of the University of Idaho at Moscow where he is oboist of the Northwest Wind Quintet He has served as an officer of the IDRS.
I recommend to my oboist colleagues the DIAL INDICATOR, a helpful tool for achieving some consistency in reed-making, a useful guide for pulling oneself out of a slump when nothing seems to be going right, and a method for standardizing our language and facilitating communication among oboists.
Those of us who learned reed-making through the schools of experience and hard knocks tend to believe that our heritage is the best possible way, but I have observed several of my reedmaking students develop more quickly with the use of a dial indicator.
Be forewarned, however that a dial indicator is merely an aid, like the millimeter rule. A dial indicator is useful only when it is coupled with a consistent approach to scraping the reed, a perceptive eye, a trained ear, a skillful and sensitive knife technique, an accurate memory of previous experiences, a working brain, patience, and, hopefully, a relatively consistent supply of cane and tubes. Anyone who expects the dial indicator to be a cure-all for reed-making troubles is doomed to disappointment; all of the aforementioned qualities must be coupled with the dial indicator (and a good concept of what the eventual product must be) in order to use the dial indicator successfully.
In fact, the limitations of the dial indicator are massive: it is useless when measuring a sloping portion of the scrape; the tip is too thin for the controllable margin of error (the difference between 2 or 3 thousandths is 50%); it takes much longer to measure a reed by machine than one's eye, if one attempts to measure all critical points (virtually an impossible task for the dial indicator).
But the advantage of the dial indicator is valid: a student who is told to "scrape the heart down to 17 thousandths" will have a much clearer idea of the ultimate goal than a student who is warned "don't take too much off the heart."
Consistency, of course, is the key to any success in reed-making. Virtually all of my reeds have a heart of 16-18 thousandths, but not every reed that measures out at 16-18 in the heart will automatically work - too many other variables enter into the picture. Because I have developed a consistent approach to reed-making, I can measure two or three points of each blade, and these few points will describe the entire blade to me.
I do not use the dial indicator to measure every reed I make - my eye and ear and tactile sensitivity are sufficient to bring most reeds to maturity. However, when problems arise, the dial indicator can usually help me discover the error more quickly than anything else. Similarly, my students know enough to measure the reed before they ask me for assistance and the mere act of measuring will frequently eliminate the need for my immediate assistance.
You may wonder why I have not submitted my own measurements for your perusal. It is because, while my measurements generally work for me and my students, I doubt whether the same measurements would work for your cane, or shape, or tubes, or scraping technique, or embouchure, or instrument, or playing requirements. Besides, no one should expect to use a duplicate of someone else's reed, even if it were possible to duplicate someone's reed from a few measurements - or from a photograph.
In August 1973, the IDRS convention in Sioux Falls, John Mack was speaking of photographs when he made the following comments, but these same comments apply to the use of someone else's reed measurements:
[Rather than looking at a photograph - or dial indicator measurements - of an oboe reed, it is] far, far more important to catalog the qualities that a reed should have. Once you have those qualities, you could go out on your own and you could sit there and you could scrape and honk and scrape and honk and so forth and so on and learn something, and find out what does what.
I have discovered that finding out "what does what" is usually facilitated by the use of the dial indicator - partly because the reed-maker is forced to think about and consider each part of the reed and its relationship to the rest of the reed, but also because the various measurements can be related to one's previous experiences.
Editor's note: Dial indicators suitable for the purposes described in this article are available from many sources, including Christlieb Products, ARB Designs, Berdon, and others - many of whom are advertisers in the IDRS Journal.