Oboe Shaving

Today I got the bore of my oboe shaved strategically by David Weber in Chandler, Arizona. This was what inspired our trip out here! Yesterday he took all the keys off my oboe, cleaned it, took measurements, oiled the mechanisms, reassembled it and adjusted the screws and pads to get it in good mechanical working order. That was all well and good—it certainly looked cleaner and shinier than I ever remember it being—but didn’t improve the instrument that much.

Then he started carefully re-reaming the bore of the instrument, first the bell (the bottom piece that flares out), then the second joint. At each step of the way he had me play the same musical passage along with certain problematic notes and intervals so we could assess how things were going. The oboe kept improving in resonance, responsiveness and smoothness between notes, sometimes just a little bit, sometimes quite markedly. It kept getting more fun to play and easier to play expressively. Whoopee!

It would have been so cool to be able to go back to the start point and then go immediately to the end point to get the full effect of the before and after. When I called Neil to let him know the work was done he could tell by the happiness and excitement in my voice that I was very satisfied. I now have a “new” oboe that is familiar and comfortable and all broken in.

I looked at the wood he scraped out afterwards, and it looked like very thin shavings of very dark chocolate along with fine, powdery black dust—a grand total of about 2 tablespoons of material. David Weber has old coffee cans filled with oboe bore shavings. I didn’t ask him why. Maybe it is a fossil record of how many instruments he has worked on…

Neil picked out a glorious picture of the sunset later that day to go with this post. That gives you some idea of how beautifully the oboe plays. I didn’t have the presence of mind to take photos of the Webers and their oboe shop.  That’s too bad because the back room is fascinating. For one thing, his reed-making desk is way messier than any I’ve ever seen and that is saying a lot.