Here's something I have yet to see mentioned in reedmaking books: does the straightness of a tube of chanter-cane's grain (or of the tube itself) matter?

For awhile I thought it did, because slips I cut from wavy/curved-grained tubes wouldn't lie flat on the table (bark-side up) after gouging: they had a noticeable "twist" to them, so I wouldn't use them. But lately I've found that after some gouging, I can manually "un-twist" such a slip, and it seems to hold the straight(er) shape. After sanding and trimming, I don't have any trouble getting such an "un-twisted but not-really-straight-grained" slip shaped into a seemingly-viable reed.

But since I keep forgetting to mark those reeds, I can't even say whether they're better or worse than reeds whose slips were perfectly straight, and laid flat, from the very start.

Have any of you found grain straightness to matter? Even aside from the obvious concern of whether they're geometrically stable, does this affect their behavior or sound?

(Since I keep receiving tubes like this from people like Tim Britton and Ted Anderson, I'm guessing it doesn't matter at all, but figured I'd ask anyhow. )

Cheers,
Mick

It has been said that cane is not an ideal material for making reeds, as it is neither straight or round, but is superior to anything else. I used to reject the less than straight tubes. As you say, I found perfectly good reeds can be made from the twisty pieces of cane. I use a radius guage to select the radii I am looking for in out-of-round tubes.