The Bassoon
For those of you unfortunate enough not to have encountered a
bassoon, it is a rather unwieldy musical instrument, being about 4
foot tall. Here is a photograph of one
Bassoon are usually made of wood, and consist of a long tube with a
reed on the end. The reed is made of two bits of cane stuck together,
and the player blows through it to make a noise. The reed is
on the end of the long thin protrusion on the photo.
It belongs to the woodwind family, which means that the player blows
down it, and, err, that it doesn't belong to the brass family of
instruments.
It can play notes from B flat (two and a bit octaves below middle c, 116.5
Hz) to approximately e'' (one and a half octaves above middle c, 622
Hz) Probably higher notes are possible, though if you wanted to play
them, you'd be better off with an oboe.
The bassoon developed from from a 16th century instrument called the
dulcian. The design has not fundamentally changed since then, though
more holes have been added to give it a chromatic scale, and the tube has been lengthened to extend the compass from C to B flat. Various
attempts have been made to redesign the bassoon using acoustical
theory, but these 'improvements' just made it sound like a saxophone,
so they were abandoned.
Not to be confused with the bassoon protein
Links
Newcastle concert band Band that I play bassoon in.
Newcastle chamber orchestra
First Act Theatrical orchestra
Semitones group that plays in care homes
Northumberland Orchestral
Society
North east amateur orchestras
Other bassoon pages
Bassoon Resource Page
Double
reed web ring Including several bassoon pages
Wikipedia
Suppliers / shops
Howarth
John Myatt
Doublereed : Second hand bassoons for sale
Musicalchairs 2nd hand bassoons (private sellers)
Manufacturers
Amati
Fox
Heckel
Moosmann
Puchner
Takeda
Wolf
Yamaha
Catalogue of makers
Books, sheet music
Dr Downing books
June Emerson Wind Music
Weait Music
Related Instruments
The Contrabassoon
The Dulcian
Contrabass compendium Lots
of very large instruments
The
Rackett
Useful Pages for bassoon players
Lots of Bassoon Fingerings
Bassoon reed adjusting
How to adjust Bassoon Reeds