I have an old Lee Oscar in C I’ve had for ages. I decided to make my first attempt at gapping the reeds, along the lines of how I’ve seen it described on various sites, videos,etc. .
I tried to achieve gaps roughly the same as the thickness of the reed, and it looks to me like I succeeded. I tried gapping all the holes from 1 – 6.
When I had finished, none of the blow reeds and only two of the draw reeds (3 and 5) were making any sound at all. Mind you, those two sounded great! Visually I can’t see the difference between any of the reeds Any idea what may have gone wrong?
If you're getting your advice from Overblow.com, I would take it with a grain of salt. I think Tinus must play pretty softly and he's setting up for overblows.
I used to set my gaps based on the information provided there and had similar results. Typically, you can get your draw reeds pretty tight without much incident, but gapping your blow reeds too tight usually ends badly.
Open your blow reed gaps back up a bit so there is defined clearance between the end of the reed and the reed plate. Adjust your draw reeds as necessary. The other thing people forget is that your blow reeds are doing alot of the work when you're playing your draw bends.
I'm no expert, but all the instructions I've seen say to gap each reed down until it chokes and then back off to taste. I don't think it's something you can do by eye and expect to work.
Gapping is a tradeoff between an action that hardly ever jams but is difficult to bend or overblow and an action that is much more responsive but more finicky. And each person's needs are different.
Maybe the reeds are not straight, maybe the little curve it is the problem. If you see a curve on the reeds, try to work on it untill the reeds are flat.
it is an iterative process, close them down till they stick then open them up till they sound again and then till you find that sweet spot when they sound really good. remember both sides interact, so once they are both sounding, little changes on either can have an effect.
