Schäferpfeife/Cornemuse du midi
Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2018 3:24 am
Hi All,
Does anyone have experience with these? I was at a workshop at the weekend with a table full of these made by Matthias Branschke and they seemed an instrument quite well suited to playing with others. Volume, range and ease of playing. Obviously the repertoire and keys are decided by the limitations of the instrument, but they seem to offer fairly good possibilities for ensemble/session playing. Obviously not the Irish stuff though a fair bit of Scottish repertoire could be played on them, only a tone lower, in G.
I played some of the sets for a while in the cellar and found it quite intuitive for a Scottish piper, though the overblown notes were new. And I played with a number of other people using them (me on flute, others on fiddle etc.), so now I am in the well-understood situation of flirting with the idea of possibly buying another instrument...
Questions:
1. I was obviously looking at Matthias' instruments and the name Torsten Tetz was also mentioned. Is there anyone else that I really should be looking at before I decided on a purchase? (I am in Hamburg, so the German makers are probably my starting point.)
2. I could go mouth blown or I could get the bellows pipe made to fit my existing bellows (from SSP). How much difference do the bellows make with these pipes? The reeds are plastic. Worth sacrificing the simplicity of a smallish mouth blown instrument?
3. There is an introductory instrument made by both of those makers which is mouth blown with one bass drone, chanter and bag - they are quite a lot cheaper than 2 drone or even more complex pipes, and do not support the options of keys. But, they could well be a good idea for getting started? Again, any experiences?
4. Torsten Tetz offers rentals of his student model - this at the moment is probably where I would start if I go down this road.
5. How maintenance intensive are they? Several of the players I spoke to never seemed to touch or even look at their chanter reeds and expected to send the pipes back to the maker for overhaul/retuning every couple of years. Does that work? I did not notice many gross tuning problems with any of those I heard being played, though I was only playing with a couple of players myself.
Thanks for your comments,
Chris.
Finally, does anyone know where the commonly used used instrument exchanges for these might be found?
Does anyone have experience with these? I was at a workshop at the weekend with a table full of these made by Matthias Branschke and they seemed an instrument quite well suited to playing with others. Volume, range and ease of playing. Obviously the repertoire and keys are decided by the limitations of the instrument, but they seem to offer fairly good possibilities for ensemble/session playing. Obviously not the Irish stuff though a fair bit of Scottish repertoire could be played on them, only a tone lower, in G.
I played some of the sets for a while in the cellar and found it quite intuitive for a Scottish piper, though the overblown notes were new. And I played with a number of other people using them (me on flute, others on fiddle etc.), so now I am in the well-understood situation of flirting with the idea of possibly buying another instrument...
Questions:
1. I was obviously looking at Matthias' instruments and the name Torsten Tetz was also mentioned. Is there anyone else that I really should be looking at before I decided on a purchase? (I am in Hamburg, so the German makers are probably my starting point.)
2. I could go mouth blown or I could get the bellows pipe made to fit my existing bellows (from SSP). How much difference do the bellows make with these pipes? The reeds are plastic. Worth sacrificing the simplicity of a smallish mouth blown instrument?
3. There is an introductory instrument made by both of those makers which is mouth blown with one bass drone, chanter and bag - they are quite a lot cheaper than 2 drone or even more complex pipes, and do not support the options of keys. But, they could well be a good idea for getting started? Again, any experiences?
4. Torsten Tetz offers rentals of his student model - this at the moment is probably where I would start if I go down this road.
5. How maintenance intensive are they? Several of the players I spoke to never seemed to touch or even look at their chanter reeds and expected to send the pipes back to the maker for overhaul/retuning every couple of years. Does that work? I did not notice many gross tuning problems with any of those I heard being played, though I was only playing with a couple of players myself.
Thanks for your comments,
Chris.
Finally, does anyone know where the commonly used used instrument exchanges for these might be found?