I teach many oboe students and always see some of the same problems. This goes for people who have been playing for a moderately long time even. We all tend to fall back into old problems and those greatly affect our playing and also how you play my oboe reeds. One of the chief problems I see that causes problems and angst among students and even Semi-Pro players is that their embouchure does not serve them well. This has been written upon many many times and you can find multiple versions of this on the internet. The main problem is that people do not play with a relaxed embouchure. They try to make the oboe reed do what they want it to do. The way we reed makers make oboe reeds here in America is that they are made to play properly with almost no embouchure manipulation.
I have a video on my website that you can see for free that talks about playing the oboe reed in the side of the mouth. The side of the mouth contains fewer muscles than in the front of the mouth and so we do not have a lot of ways to manipulate are embouchure if we play in the side of a mouth like a flute player would play! Now, i’m NOT talking about playing like this all the time of course, but it is a way to see what your embouchure is doing. I have seen students of Ralph Gomberg doing this very same thing in testing an oboe teed. So take a look at that particular video and apply it to your own embouchure. If you do that, you will allow the oboe Reeds that I have so painstakingly adjusted to play like they are supposed to. I sometimes tell my students when they come here: Don’t mess with my oboe reeds with your embouchure! Let them do what they are supposed to do.
Abby is pictured on this blog showing a proper embouchure. She was kind enough to send me this photo. She a fantastic player and an Oboe Major at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and I am SO proud of her!
Kerry