Musicians launch campaign to save the bassoon | Hacker News Reader

Musicians launch campaign to save the bassoon

theguardian.com

I played bassoon for years and would love to play bassoon now that I am not in school. The trouble is that bassoons are extremely expensive. Even a terrible plastic bassoon costs thousands of dollars, and a "good" bassoon is $20k-40k last I checked, though you can get lucky on a used wooden one, which still won't come cheaply. Another less important issue I think is the difficulty in finding a good reed source: Mass-produced single reeds (clarinet, etc.) play very well, but mass-produced double reeds are practically unplayable (a double reed is the mouthpiece so any inadequacies are glaring).

Demand for bassoonists shouldn't diminish anytime soon, the sound is a crucial part of a symphony orchestra.

How much does a good reed cost? They aren't very big, are they? If quality depends on skilled handwork, why can't they be ordered cheaply from e.g. the Philippines?

I used to pay $20 for a reed that my tutor made (about the same price as a box of nice clarinet reeds). It's possible they could be produced more cheaply in another part of the world, but you need a bassoon to test on (again, not cheap) and the manufacturer should themselves be a skilled bassoonist to capably test the reed across the instrument's significant range. A reed's musical qualities are influenced by local conditions (humidity, etc.) so a reed that works well in one place may sound terrible in another. The current model, where accomplished bassoonists and teachers make reeds to meet the small, local demand, seems to at least be workable.

I pointed out reeds as only a secondary issue because there seem to be more oboists than bassoonists. Oboists have the same challenge of finding a good reed-maker, or acquiring reed-making tools and canes, and learning the craft themselves. Oboes are much cheaper than bassoons and sometimes can even be rented (good luck finding a place willing to rent a bassoon -- the vast majority of bassoonists get their instrument from their school system).

I'm slightly squicked by the idea that someone would test your reeds on their bassoon before you get them. Did I read that wrong?

If it's mass produced, you can test every 100th, throw them away and assume that other 99 are ok. If you're producing small quantity for friends/students, they can always return the bad ones to you. You don't have to test the exact one you're selling.

Due to the variability of cane, every reed must be tested.

At the woodwind shop I buy reeds from, it's pretty standard practice to try before you buy when looking for something new. You take a batch down to the basement and try them out on your bassoon. If you don't like them, they go back in the box and someone else may buy them. It's just the same as donating a reed to another player etc - all part of the job.

I can't even imagine what my friend is going through now trying to keep his instrument sounding decent. He plays bassoon in one of the U.S. navy bands that is deployed with a hospital ship doing community relations type work in Southeast Asia. He's constantly posting pictures of the band hauling instruments up and down mountain sides, through rain forests, etc. The humidity must be wreaking havoc on the instrument.

That's incredible! The good news is that it's already warm and humid (woodwinds have a much harder time with being warmed up after very cold storage).

Here's a video showing how a $22 reed is produced:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smanwe3_hY8&feature=youtu.be

If that's all there is to it, ISTM most adult bassoon players could just make their own reeds.

There's quite a few tools used in that video, including a custom jig and some forms. You'd be looking at a moderate upfront investment, plus have a reasonable feel for working with the material to get it to the appropriate tolerances.

It should be possible to make many musical instruments more cheaply. The pBone and pTrumpet prove that quality, affordable brass instruments can be made from plastic. Bassoon should be even easier (except for the reed).

Indeed, there are also good clarinets and piccolos made from plastic. I can't comment on how good. An issue with the "endangered" instruments is that the lack of demand frustrates the desire to win economies of scale. This is certainly true of the double bass, which I play. Student quality instruments can be made from plywood, but fitting and finishing are still done by hand, and economies are won by doing production in countries with low labor costs.

Brass and woodwind instruments are very different beasts though. Plastic clarinets for instance are mostly found in marching bands due to their inferior (brighter) sound, and those instruments are certainly not all plastic. Most woodwind instruments are mechanically intricate, so I'd be impressed if someone could make a pTrumpet version of a clarinet or bassoon (I'd be just as impressed by a pFrenchHorn). Note the difference in sound between a plastic and wooden recorder, one of the simplest woodwinds. I played on a plastic bassoon for the first year, and they do not sound good at all.

FWIW I consider the Yamaha YHR-862 horns to be your pFrenchHorn: at around $3,000 not exactly ultra cheap, but a lot of players have owned one as their first double horn.

Mass manufactured, good enough for orchestra playing, can take an unbelievable amount of damage (I took the valves out myself for heavy duty maintenance, something I would never do on my gold brass 1103), a gateway to the much more expensive Alexanders that an all-brands trial will inevitably result in you purchasing...

I think Yamaha is trying the same approach with pianos but do not believe (from experience) their officious claim that their grands are anywhere close to Steinways. There is nothing in the world like a Model C or D, yet.

They don't have to be horrible. Boosey & Hawkes made a particularly nice composite clarinet (many moons ago now - I bought mine more than forty years ago) that didn't sell particularly well, since it had the minor disadvantage of being somewhat more expensive than a low-end wooden instrument. (It was also heavy enough that your right thumb would notice after a long session.) Longitudinal glass fibre and some heavy filler in the resin; it was probably a lot more expensive to fabricate then than it would be now, especially if the instrument has a conical rather than cylindrical bore, and I'm sure the materials could be optimized a lot more easily on a computer rather than by the trial-and-error of the day.

I can see why a brass trumpet can be expensive. Making one seems to involve a lot of manual work, at least as shown in this "How It's Made" segment [1]. Another interesting video is this one from Yamaha showing their factory [2], which is also mostly manual.

The actual cost of the brass in a trumpet is on the order of $3 at current brass prices, so it is clear most of the cost is labor and "what the market will bear".

I'm not very knowledgeable about manufacturing, but based on watching a lot of "How It's Made" and similar shows, I'd expect the plastic trumpet's manufacture is more automated. I'm not sure why brass trumpets could not be automated, though.

I do note that brass trumpets do not have to be expensive. Amazon has many many brass trumpets that are less than the Amazon price for the pTrumpet, and are higher rated [3]. Perhaps these are made using more automation than the trumpets in the above cited videos?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NAaRQUTp9g

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIqDhO1iddo

[3] I'm not sure that these are all brass. Some of the descriptions make it sound like some are using other materials for at least some of the metal parts.

I see a brass horn at $140 (to the pTrumpet's $180) and I'll wager the pTrumpet is a much better instrument. But I didn't say brass costs more than plastic.

The problem with bassoons is the labor. Because of the low volume, they're not made like commodities (as trumpets and even violins are). My suggestion is that plastic manufacturing, of the sort proven by the pTrumpet, could be a fast route to commodity bassoons.

Having played on (and heard people play on) a pBone, I'd have to say that even though it's quite impressive to see what they've been able to do with just plastic, it's still quite some way off from being a 'quality' instrument.

And they do not prove at all that the same can be done for any kind of instrument: trumpets and trombones are a lot cheaper to make than things like bassoons - you can find very cheap brass trumpets on ebay for very little money, some of which are surprisingly acceptable; and a rather good trumpet will set you back quite a lot less than a basson only fit for a beginner.

The pTrumpet is at least as good as typical student horns I've played. I can't speak to the pBone but reviews seem positive.

Quite right, trumpets are already made in volume and thus are already sold at their marginal cost of production. Bassoons aren't. This is the reason for their high cost. I claim the manufacturing process used for pBones and pTrumpets could be used to produce a comparably-priced bassoon that would be adequate for students (it would be harder though maybe still doable with wood).

It's hard to believe I may have useful information about this, but I used to know a guy from the University of Colorado at Boulder who was getting his master's degree in bassoon performance by day and sneaking out to the physics lab at night to work on machining reed-making equipment. Now he's got a company, http://www.bartoncane.com/, that seems to be way better than mass produced and way cheaper than custom... or at least, that's how it seems to me, a guy who doesn't play the bassoon.

Very cool! Now I just need to save up, for a long time, for a bassoon :)

I've been pricing student oboes, you could do something decent for $1.5k (used grenadilla Yamaha).

Also, oboists have been trialling synthetic cane, with promising results: http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=10&i=27...

If you are still looking for reeds, my sister sells hand-made ones at a reasonable cost: http://www.gobassoon.com/

This looks great! I bet she could get away with charging a little more :)

Honestly - the high end of the cost bracket isn't really very relevant. Yes, you can pay £25k for a Heckel, but that's pretty much the only make that goes that expensive. Puchners are _very_ highly rated and start sub-£10k new. And then you'd be surprised at the number of players who are still using e.g. a student Adler. My bassoon cost just south of £3k new, which isn't cheap for a 'student' instrument <edit>i.e. compared to non-bassoons</edit>, but has taken me through from grade 2 (I used a music service instrument for ~1 year first) to my diploma and onward - I haven't replaced it!

Sure, I'd love an upgrade to some fancy-pants model, and it's thrilling to have a tootle on other bassoonists' instruments from time to time, but virtually no one needs what the parent comment called a "good" bassoon.

Order of importance for making a good sound? player > reed > crook > bassoon

I can't comment on the availability of reeds where you are, but I'll agree they can be a bit of a pain. They're expensive (mine are £20 each) and variable. That said, once you've got an instrument, the ongoing costs of playing the bassoon are much lower than many hobbies.

Interesting, I didn't know decent bassoons were available cheaply. I played on a couple of old Fox bassoons in school (a decent brand but nothing incredible) and found even these instruments to cost at least $7,000 used. More palatable, but still quite expensive for a musical instrument that might need repairs. I'll have to take a look at these Puchners some time!

Just a personal observation, the instruments that are typically identified as "endangered," are all ridiculously hard to learn as an adult, even if you've played another instrument. Bassoon has bizarre fingerings compared to the other woodwinds. Viola has that damned clef. Double bass is physically dangerous to play. French horn is just hard.

I'd agree re: the bassoon being "ridiculously hard to learn". I've never considered myself a good woodwind player, but at the point I tried to learn bassoon I'd played a reasonable amount of saxophone (alto and tenor) and clarinet. None of that prepared me for the oddness and difficult of the bassoon. I found it to be a supremely unrewarding instrument to attempt to learn (albeit I recognize that I'm the kind of person who is quick to give up if I don't feel like I'm making any progress at something). My instructor told me that I'd likely need to learn to make my own reeds, too. That wasn't something that made me any more enthusiastic for the instrument.

On top of different fingerings, it's tough when the instrument isn't one of the "cute" ones, like big cats and other mammals getting more attention from conservation efforts.

Its inability to find a home with a lot of popular genres over the last hundred or so years has let it fall further from the public consciousness, and its tonal sweet spot being so low means it can't easily slide into the parts written for other more pop-friendly instruments. It's a bit harsh as well, when we're comparing to alto saxophones and clarinets and such.

I learned it and played it for years growing up and loved the bassoon. (For what it's worth, I also cut my fingers on a viola before that, so I may just have made a point to pick the odd instruments.)

I'd certainly like to see it revived or even see it find a niche in modern music. I'm just not sure where that would be.

Bizarre fingerings and a lot of very unstable harmonics scattered throughout. You can't just hit the fingerings and expect the right pitches to come out, a lot of the notes (F# below middle C in particular) take throat contortions to get the note to land in tune, and of course you're changing this as you are fingering different pitches. Not to mention the challenges of quickly tonguing passages with a chunk of heavy cane in your mouth.

The unstable pitches do tend to develop a young musician's ear mightily though. It's an instrument that forms an odd bond as well; I recently met another bassoonist and we dropped everything we were doing to make reeds together.

I was thinking about clefs recently. Why are we so fixed on two clefs? All that a clef needs to do is to indicate (a) where the G is and (b) which octave it is in. When I play with ideas I just put a 'x' on the G line with a superscript 4 next to it.

Music theory could be taught in a way so that students learnt to find the G as a matter of course. But for some reason we've been beaten into thinking in terms of these two clefs.

It might have something to do with the way a conductor reads full-score. With typesetting technology it should be mess important to have conductor and accompanist on the same clef. We're not far from a point where everything could move to e-ink. It'll probably take another century for music libraries to have been completely moved to digital.

I've played the violin and the viola. If you're a violinist you can get a good sound out of the viola after literally a few minutes of practice. Reading the viola clef is strictly less difficult than reading the transposing clefs used by brass and winds.

I don't know what "the double bass is physically dangerous to play" means. If you mean you can get RSI from it, you can do that on any instrument.

When the strings on a Bass go, they really go. I've been hurt once or twice from strings breaking.

That's true. And approaches to each instrument, to avoid injury, have become a pretty mainstream part of teaching.

I actually suspect that bass isn't all that endangered, and that it has had somewhat of a resurgence. There were quite a few kids playing bass at the school string concerts that my kids play in.

Of course bass has the problem of being every parent's nightmare due to its size. ;-)

For me, the endangered-ness of the bass, at the time, was a blessing because it meant that I could serve a role in an ensemble without being a virtuoso.

Even common musical instruments have terrible user interfaces. I only realized this after playing with a Tenori-On[1] which is really easy to pick up and make music on. Making music doesn't need to be hard and shouldn't require thousands of hours of practice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenori-on

Hmm, yes, there's VST's, ribbon controllers, ableton Push and the samplers, arpeggiators and sequencers builtin to DAWs and many synths. And Max for Live is amazing.

I have devoted thousands of hours voluntarily as an adult to guitar, mandolin, clarinet, violin and viola, among others (after many years of involuntary music lessons as a kid), I think it's worthwhile, but there's definitely a trend to using e.g. drum VST's in recordings in such a way that it's hard to discern that they're not live drum tracks.

I've tried most of the non-brass instruments: alto clef, not that hard to transpose to anybody that's able to read a piano's grand staff. Tenor clef does require work, and reading, say a Bach chorale in SATB, oof. But violists seem to have a high incidence of injury (i have never played one bigger than 15"

Cello and especially double bass do require buildup of strength in the left hand, and fingers start high and come flying down onto the string (composite winds have a lot less tension than steel tho).

French horn embouchure and intonation are hard, as you say.

When I was 10 years old, my school required us to learn an instrument. I selected the bassoon, because 'no-one plays the bassoon!'. Lasted less than a week - my little hands couldn't reach around the instrument to do the correct fingerings...

> “At the moment, only about 1% of people on the street can even recognise this instrument,”

does this mean "look at this object, and guess what it is", or "recognize this sound" ?

I'd expect a lot of people to be familiar with "the sorcerer's apprentice" due to Fantasia (contrabassoon, I believe).

On the other hand, I consider myself a normally educated person with no musical culture, and I wouldn't be able to tell the name of most musical instruments.

I do not want to sound mean but perhaps the name "Faggot" is one of the cause of alienation.

Where did you see that?

He's misspelled the word, but Germanic and Slavic languages use forms of Italian's "fagotto" for bassoon.

Coming from the US, I'll admit I had a double-take the first time I saw a bassoon advertised in a music shop window in Germany, before I figured out what they were actually selling.

My old score of the Rite of Spring had "fag." written on every line and I'm pretty sure it was an English-branded version on the cover. I could see kids being worried about getting made fun of for that.

If anyone wants to hear the diverse sound of the bassoon, the very first notes of the Rite of Spring are the way to go in my opinion. The story goes that musicians were shocked by the line Stravinsky wrote, saying it sounded like it was meant to be played on a saxaphone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4am3YRpfiHs

For what it's worth, they probably translated the cover and left the score in whatever language it had been previously published in.

I also really liked this recording of Gustavo Nunez's bassoon solo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfg9IIXhcPk

It's an interesting contrast in how open / mellow he can keep his vowels, and the variety in sound profiles various bassoons themselves have.

It comes from the Italian "fagotto," and those languages that use the Italian form (instead of the French/English "basson/bassoon") have a different word for the pejorative you're inferring. Also, it'll be spelled with one "g", not two.

If you say "Ich hasse das Fagott" to a German they'll know you're opining on woodwinds and not confused whether you're insulting a homosexual.

Thanks, I got confused because in Wikipedia disambiguation page it says "Bassoon, variously called fagotto, faggot, fagott, fagot".

I'd be mildly curious to know which language spells it with two "g"s; I've only ever seen it with one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com