Recently I’ve been mak­ing more reeds than usual, largely because I’m try­ing to fig­ure out how to make reeds for three 19^th-century bas­soons that I’m learn­ing to play for an upcom­ing lec­ture recital. I quickly became tired of stor­ing active reeds on a dry­ing rack, and decided that I needed an addi­tional reed case. At about the same time, I real­ized that although I’ve played con­tra­bas­soon for about ten years, I’ve never actu­ally owned a proper con­tra reed case. I’ve kept my two old­est reeds (bought my fresh­man year of col­lege, and still work­ing rea­son­ably well) in an old pen case, and the four reeds I’ve made myself (at least one of which is still a blank) have lived in an Altoids tin.

In my search for reed cases from var­i­ous dou­ble reed sup­pli­ers, I came across the web site of Roger Gar­rett, who is pro­fes­sor of both clar­inet and instru­men­tal con­duct­ing at Illi­nois Wes­leyan Uni­ver­sity. On the side, Gar­rett is a skilled wood­wright. He makes reed cases, batons, baton cases, pens, and a vari­ety of other items. On his site, he pro­vides a wealth of infor­ma­tion about his reed cases — stan­dard sizes and con­fig­u­ra­tions, exam­ples of bespoke cases he’s made, and pho­tos of cases in a vari­ety of com­mon and exotic woods.

I cor­re­sponded with Gar­rett a bit before plac­ing an order, ask­ing about the prices of dif­fer­ent woods and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of mod­i­fy­ing his stan­dard bas­soon reed case design. His basic case has a foam strip that holds six bas­soon reeds, but I have a sim­i­larly sized case that holds nine. I ended up hav­ing him send along one of his oboe reed strips, which with a lit­tle mod­i­fi­ca­tion allowed me to fit eight bas­soon reeds instead of six. He hap­pened to have a curly maple con­tra­bas­soon case and a quilted maple bas­soon case ready to go, so I bought them:

Bas­soon and Con­tra­bas­soon Reed Cases

The Cases Opened

The prices were very rea­son­able (the same or less than I would’ve paid for less inter­est­ing cases from a dou­ble reed sup­plier), and as you can see, the cases are gor­geous. Some­day when I’m rich and famous, I’ll order some African black­wood or cocobolo cases with a match­ing foun­tain pen.