[Alan Brinton]

Can you say something about how you change the reed clearance, Steven? I do it by gently springing the reed up or pushing it down a few times with a flexible plastic toothpick. On one occasion while widening the gap I snapped the reed off. The reed is inflexible and fragile at the base where it’s connected. In this case, I believe the reed had already failed, and I was getting carried away trying to get it to work.

Don’t you think the most common way to produce a balanced sound is in terms of what one does while playing, compensating (mostly subconsciously) for how much air pressure is required for where you are on the keyboard? I’m wondering about the advisability (for some of us, at least) of trying to address this issue by reed gapping. I’ve done a lot of tuning but have done reed gapping only to address a problem or when a particular reed’s gapping is noticeably out of line with the others. But I’m open to the possibility of a more aggressive approach.