Materials
Most reeds for woodwind instruments are made from cane, but synthetic reeds are used by a small number of clarinetists, saxophonists, and double reed players, as well as by bagpipers. Synthetic reeds are generally more durable than their natural counterparts and do not need to be moistened prior to playing. Many players consider them to have inferior tone quality.
Recent developments in synthetic reed technology have produced reeds made from synthetic polymer compounds, and as technology in this area has progressed, synthetic reeds have gained more acceptance. Synthetic reeds are useful when the instrument is played intermittently with long breaks in between, during which time a natural reed might become dry.
The dizi, a Chinese transverse flute, has a distinctive kind of reed (a di mo), which is made from a paper-like bamboo membrane.
Read more about this topic: Reed (instrument)
Famous quotes containing the word materials:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)