How to Break in Clarinet and Saxophone Reeds! 

That’s great, I hope it continues to help!

Hah! It must be funny to hear your own words quoted back to you! Thanks JK!

Thanks Jeff!

I hope the method works well for you!

It’s been a while since I’ve played on plastic reeds. But in my experience they tend to “break in” a little bit over the course of the first practice session or two, but I’ve never found that they needed a special break in process to play their best!

@@ParkHouseCreations Thanks again. It's my first try at plastic reeds. First tried the Legere and was pleasantly surprised. But after one of your videos, I got A Silverstein, which I much prefer. Still not convinced about them, but great for practice at this point.

Very rarely and only if I feel like really digging into the process of working on a reed. If a reed starts to warp I will sand the back to flatten it, but then that usually requires other parts of the reed to require adjustment as well, to compensate for the material taken from the back. Different spots on the vamp generally end up needing to be adjusted and the tip sometimes has to be clipped. If I just sand the back without the other steps I generally find I lose the quality of sound that I want from my reeds. But everyone has different tolerances and preferences, so I totally understand if someone prefers a reed that has had its back flattened without the other steps! Most of the time it’s just more time than I would like to spend, so I stick to the break-in process in this video.

@@ParkHouseCreations I play saxophone and I just today started conditioning my reeds with your method. I hope it calms the tendencies that my reeds have to warping so I don’t have to sand the back. I also never really thought about taking material off of the vamp after flattening the back. That sounds very useful. Thank you for the help!!

I hope it helps!! Thanks for watching!