I've been breaking in my delightful Dolmetsch olive wood recorder slowly. I'm approaching four weeks I think. It badly needed to be oiled--I actually did it twice, carefully, when it was completely dried. Anyway, it plays longer now (it would sort of crap out after 20 minutes in the first weeks, and I'd stop playing for the day); today I played for 50 minutes with no real problems. And I'm able to voice the high 'b' cleanly now. Haven't hit C yet!

I dried and put it in its box, leaving that open. Is it advisable now, or in the future when it's further broken in, to play it again some hours from now? Or is a wooden recorder done for the day after a session of an hour or so?

I seem to have a wet mouth, sadly.

Oh, and is it fine to use the anti-wet stuff that came with the Moeck cleaning/oiling kit?

I'm new here in the forum, but have 5 years of experience with the recorder and play the whole quartet. Personally, I haven't played my wooden recorders twice a day - so far. I take a plastic one when I want to play when the wooden one is "done". However, I'm not sure that's actually necessary, especially as I have found that my recorders (Kunath, Takeyama, Mollenhauer, Küng, from soprano to bass) all sound best when they are really wet (and I mean dripping! Even if water in the thumbhole is a bl... nuisance.) So at the next opportunity I'll play the recorder at home before driving to my lesson to start there with a slightly wet recorder - in view of concerts, where we have never enough time to really play in the instruments beforehand.

In short, what I'm trying to say: It certainly won't harm your recorder if you play it only once. I don't think it will do any harm to play it twice - but I can't say for sure. If you really want to play a second time and don't have an alternative instrument, you might try it carefully and see what happens - if your Dolmetsch clogs up immediately it's probably unhappy about having to work overtime...

Playing your recorder twice or more a day once it's played in won't hurt it. You don't want to be playing 24/7, but up to a few hours daily (I'm intentionally not defining that further because instruments vary and there's still judgement involved) should normally be fine.

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