Have you a personal supply of gold beater's skin? In my orchestra
days (in high school) an oboeist in our orchestra made his reeds
using this rather grotesquely named material.
Instrumentalists are, in some ways, worse than audiophiles when
it comes to superstition. The experiments to which I referred in
a previous post are in the literature; they are not my experiments.
(I did some on tympani which I did not publish, but Rossing did
similar experiments later which he did publish, getting similar
results to some of mine.) In the modeling clay experiment the bell
of the instrument was covered with clay, of course.