Hi all, I tried sending this a day or so ago but it ended up in a bit-bucket somewhere.
I am tremendously glad that Chris has made this contribution as it fits in with what I have felt for years. As I understand it, the single beating reed which we use in the drones is inherently less responsive to changes in pressure than the double beating reed of the chanter. This makes it entirely possible to bend the pitch of the chanter by changing bag pressure without substantially affecting the pitch of the drones. Let us say that a player wishes to play in concert F or F+20 cents or any other pitch to fit in with other pipers,( or even musicians). It should be possible to tune a drone to the appropriate pitch with an electronic tuner and then tune the remaining drones to match it. Then the piper can adjust the bag pressure when playing to bring the chanter in tune with the drones or if this is not possible, open, close or change the reed to achieve the desired pitch. If players have trouble keeping the pitch of their drones steady, they should look to their reeds. I have checked this with Adrian Schofield and Andy May and the pitch of their drones is remarkably constant even with fairly large changes in pressure. I would like to be able to make drone reeds which give a constant pitch from 12" to 20" of water gauge. With such reeds, the problems beginners have in getting steady drones would be much reduced. I think many beginners are fighting pipes which are poorly set up. The worst case of all is to have a drone reed which decreases in pitch as the pressure increases. This is what I call a 'hiding to nothing'. I believe that when the reed is removed from the drone and sucked to sound it, it should cut in cleanly and maintain a steady pitch even with increasing suck. I would not consider fitting a reed to drone until it was stable on its own. My twopennorth Barry On 28 Aug 2008 at 10:00, Ormston, Chris wrote: > > "In practice, of course, slight tempering can be applied and > pressure tweaked (oops, heresy aaarghh!!)" > > I'd not consider this heresy at all. I'd bet most competent pipers will > (sometimes without even realising they're doing it) make slight > adjustments to pressure to get the best tuning from their chanters. Of > course, you need good, stable drones that are not too pressure-sensitive > to achieve this. I've not measured this scientifically, but I think I > drop pressure slightly when playing in D. > > I find that I also make slight pressure changes to bring out the > tonal quality of each note too, or to enhance the quality of vibrato - > this works well for slow tunes, but may not be practical when playing > Holey Ha'penny :) > > Chris > > To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
