Are you starting to notice that the reed that had been playing amazingly well is now feeling like a wet sock or is feeling really hard? What time of year is it? What is happening with the weather? It might be as simple as it is currently raining a lot.
Maybe you have a sunny weather reed.
Let me begin by saying that the larger the reed is, the longer it lasts. Oboe reeds notoriously age quickly and, in contrast, there are many stories about the contra bassoon player who has been playing on the same reed for ten years. Whether that player’s reed has lasted an incredibly long time, or they rarely play the instrument, is a different conversation.
I started noticing a trend when I had two separate reed cases for my contra. To help select which reed I wanted to play in the auditorium, I would put all of my current best reeds into one case. After a couple of years, I started to notice that in the summer, I was always playing out of one reed box and, in the winter, I was always playing out of the other. As I rotated new reeds into these boxes, they would be selected and adjusted for that particular season. This was more subtle in my bassoon reed case.
I have a large twelve reed case and I started to notice that I was shifting between seasons from the left side to the right side of the case. I tend to keep my favorite reeds close together, so they are easy to pick out. As new reeds get folded in, they get placed by my current favorites. As the seasons begin to change and my favorite reeds are not being their best, I would try the other side of the reed case and those reeds invariably seem to be more responsive.
This isn’t to say that reeds don’t wear out. They do break down and come to the end of their usefulness, and this depends on how you care for your reed. But, is your reed responding differently in an unexplained fashion? Is the weather shifting through the fall or spring?
As you head into winter or summer, maybe set those reeds aside and come back to them the following year. It is important to have enough reeds in your case that respond to different weather and humidity. You don’t want to be caught off guard when following a week of sunny day rehearsals, you get caught in a rainstorm on concert day.