Oh, but my reeds are Terrible this month. I have been spending wayyy more time on them with wayyy less impressive results. The more I work the worse they sound and the worse I feel. It's a sneaky hate spiral of Oboe proportions.

There is, at least, two common problems:

-that awful shrieking in the high notes
- horrid flat and kazoo-like tendencies.

Must run now. Will brainstorm solutions/troubleshoot later.

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Seriously low on reeds. Having the dull knife problem again. Ugh. I've also somehow damaged the side of my shaper tip with the razor while shaping cane, so now every time I shape a piece of cane the razor catches and it's super hard not to destroy it. AUGH. Not sure how it happened, but I might have to buy a new shaper tip - it's getting really annoying.

Playing Beethoven 4 tonight - I'm still not sure I like it (which is a horrible thing to say, I know, but it just never grew on me). Usually ...
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Making reeds under the pressure of an upcoming performance is always a little terrifying, but it seems like having a revolving cycle of different stages of reeds takes a little of the fear out of it. I've finally gotten to the point where I'll always have a few blanks, a few profiled and a few nearly finished reeds in my case, and boy does that make it easier to have a reed ready for tomorrow when I need it!

This week my student had a reed crisis at the same time as me; apparently an over enth...
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This month has been very busy; two concerts in one weekend and lots of activity surrounding the new OperaFeHk ensemble's concert coming up in November. With all this thinking ahead I haven't even started to think about a Halloween costume! 

One thing's for sure, though, I need to perform a piece involving a Thunder Tube. 

I finally broke down and bought a new reed knife - you can only re-grind the edge so many times. Now to start a new batch of brightly coloured reeds for the coming month!


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