bassoon

I played bassoon for years and would love to play bassoon now that I am not in school.

The bassoon is in kind of an interesting position because it's used in basically every full symphonic score ever, but uncommonly played.

The double reed, woody sound, and enormous four-octave range make playing the bassoon a really unique endeavor.

My bassoon cost just south of £3k new, which isn't cheap for a 'student' instrument <edit>i.e.

That said, once you've got an instrument, the ongoing costs of playing the bassoon are much lower than many hobbies.

Are there other instruments that are comparably scarce, or is the bassoon a uniquely uncommon specialty?

You take a batch down to the basement and try them out on your bassoon.

I played on a plastic bassoon for the first year, and they do not sound good at all.

None of that prepared me for the oddness and difficult of the bassoon.

I'm slightly squicked by the idea that someone would test your reeds on their bassoon before you get them.

I still hope they'll be able to create a synthesized instrument capable of reproducing the sound of the bassoon.

Most universities will have two to five bassoon majors at any given time.

He's misspelled the word, but Germanic and Slavic languages use forms of Italian's "fagotto" for bassoon.

Even a terrible plastic bassoon costs thousands of dollars, and a "good" bassoon is $20k-40k last I checked, though you can get lucky on a used wooden one, which still won't come cheaply.

Thanks, I got confused because in Wikipedia disambiguation page it says "Bassoon, variously called fagotto, faggot, fagott, fagot".

I'd agree re: the bassoon being "ridiculously hard to learn".

Bassoon has bizarre fingerings compared to the other woodwinds.

Bassoon should be even easier (except for the reed).