u/Ben-Oboe

Hello again everybody. This community has been extremely helpful before so I'm giving it another go with knife sharpening. I often watch other reedmakers scrape and I am amazed at how easily they scrape of greats amount of cane with seemingly little to no effort. I feel like I get a decent burr but I still have to apply some downward pressure to get it to take cane off and even then it's taking off very little unless I really apply more pressure. I know this is not ideal and so I am left thinking that my knife is not correctly sharpened. Right now I use a single beveled knife for my rough scraping and then a jende double hollow ground for my finish scraping/fine scraping. (I'm a lefty unfortunately). I do use a couple of the Jende wet stones to sharpen and the fine ceramic sticks to reset the burr as needed while scraping. I have tried many approaches to sharpening, but the one I am currently on is keeping the knife at a constant 15-20 degrees, starting with the back of the blade down and doing 8-10 strokes back and forth, then going to the other side at the same angle, and doing this a few times slowly doing lighter and lighter pressure, and the last stroke is knife flat on the stone with the back of the blade up, just one quick pull across the stone length-wise. Any advice is appreciated.

Hi, I've been playing the oboe and making my own reeds for a long time, but I have really struggled to get the double c crow. Usually my reeds just peep one 'C', but I can feel the reed vibrating on my lips even down past the heart when I'm playing. They play the whole range and usually very comfortably. Often while I am making them I will get some sort of crow but when it's crowing the reed feels far to flat and I have to really work to bring it up to pitch. I clip which solves the 'too flat' feeling, but then the crow is lost. The reeds feel okay to me but I will say I wish they had more of a ringing tone. For a long time I just told myself that I am just a different player with different reed preferences. Do you have thoughts on this? I've honestly done a ton of personal research, reading articles/dissertations on reeds and reed making, reading books about it, watching tons of videos on it by different makers and of course talking to whomever I can about it to get advice. I'm at the end of my rope on this, so any insights are appreciated.