Short History of the development of Paul Buttemer Reed Products

In 1982, I started a small business making bassoon reeds for commercial sale. I started with commercially gouged cane and used the conventional tools that many bassoonists are familiar with. As things progressed, I started to make templates for my profiling machine in an effort to get the profile close to a finished one and reduce the amount of scraping needed to produce a finished reed. I also bought a number of different shapers and became intrigued with how different shapes affected the reed. This lead to what is a fascination to this day about how each dimensional aspect of a reed affect how it plays. I started to dream about a way of having complete freedom to design and build any reed I could imagine.

In 1985 I started to talk with Greg James (Precision Music Products), an old school-mate of mine who was pursuing a career as both a musician and a self-employed machinist, about the possibility of building a profiling machine to which stepper motors and computer controls could be attached. In 1988 Greg delivered such a machine to me. I immediately started hooking up the controls and writing software to control the machine. A few months later I was able to produce my first profiles.

A year or so after Greg delivered the first machine, we started talking of a much grander project: a machine that could take a piece of cane split right from a tube, then gouge, shape and profile it, all under computer control. In 1994 this machine became a reality. Greg had worked constantly for almost two years on this machine. It then took me another two years of working night and day, seven days a week, to hook up all the controls and write the software to control the machine and design reeds. It has taken a further eight years of experimentation to discover the details of a wide variety of reed models and to decide on which models to offer to other bassoonists.

Paul Buttemer

Since 1972, I have had concurrent careers as both a bassoonist and a software developer. In 1978, I graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelors' degree in Music Performance. My main steady music jobs in Toronto were with the National Ballet of Canada and the Esprit Orchestra. I also did a considerable amount of freelance work. In the computer field, I held jobs with General Electric as well as other lesser-known companies. In 1988 I moved to the west coast of Canada and continued both careers. Since then I have done freelance work as a bassoonist with the Victoria Symphony, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Pacific Opera Company as well as other freelance work. I have also worked extensively as a self-employed software development consultant. At the date of writing (March, 2004) I live in Victoria, Canada.