Our Story

The new reed standard

Forestone is the result of 30-year quest to bring single reed playing into the modern age, no longer dependent on that fickle piece of wood that is the source of so much worry and frustration for the vast majority of clarinet and saxophone players.

We began with extensive scientific research. We looked at the basic structure of single reeds. We measured various profiles. We studied fabrication methods and how those methods affect the finished reed. We used waveform analysis to uncover what constitutes a clear-sounding, resilient and optimally responsive single reed.

In the end, we developed a profile that we believed would result in a superior reed. Our attention then shifted to an appropriate synthetic material that would provide the kind of resonance, projection, flexibility and feel that single reed players have come to demand from the best cane reeds.

Hundreds of different materials were tried and analyzed. After decades of experimentation, we finally settled upon a special polypropylene resin. There are many such resins available but this is the only one that contains wood cellulose fibre, more than 50 percent of which is actual bamboo. This resin had all the all the properties we were searching for, and Forestone is now the only company in the world that has access to this proprietary material for the production of single reeds.

To produce our reeds, we decided to forego the long established method of machining in favour of injection moulding. This was a particularly difficult challenge as the injection moulding process was insufficiently advanced at the time to produce the required thinness at the tip. We were eventually able to overcome this problem and refine the process to achieve this desired thinness, creating the world's premiere synthetic single reed.