Pinchbeck smallpipes

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DjUntzUntz
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Pinchbeck smallpipes

Post by DjUntzUntz »

I was looking around on the internet for smallpipes and came across several websites where smallpipes were offered. One of the following websites really
appealed to me because of how the smallpipes looked and also the sound appeals to me personally.

Anybody has experience with Pinchbeck smallpipes or knows something about his smallpipes and/or his website?

He also has something interesting called the extending tuning drones (ETR called on his website). Don't know if this is something common
in the smallpipes but it looks professional to me. Hopefully any/many of you have an opinion about how the smallpipes look and sound.

http://pinchbeckpipes.com/

Kind regards
ckrusor
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Re: Pinchbeck smallpipes

Post by ckrusor »

Dj, I recently invited Chris Pinchbeck to participate in a thread about his ETR drones in the Bob Dunsire smallpipes forum:

http://forums.bobdunsire.com/forums/sho ... p?t=153744

He explained his ETR drones a bit and had some thoughts about alternative tuning schemes for smallpipes. Also, Ralph Loomis wrote an article about tuning of smallpipes drones that includes some sound clips of him playing several tunes on Pinchbeck ETR pipes with the drones in different tuning configurations. You might be familiar with the article:

http://theotherpipers.org/index/?p=956

I exchanged a couple of emails with Ralph, and he says that he loves his Pinchbeck ETR pipes, uses the extended tuning range of the drones regularly, and he highly recommends them. One thing to note: switching from an A/E or A/D tuning configuration on the drones to B/F#, C#/G, or some other alternative requires switching chanters or major chanter retuning. This is the topic of the Bob Dunsire thread I linked. You might be aware of this, but I wasn't when I started that thread. I'm familiar with chanters in various keys, but I thought one might be able to accomodate multiple different drone tuning arrangements on a single chanter, and this isn't the case. I still don't have enough music theory expertise to completely understand why. Ralph doesn't mention the necessity to switch chanters in his article, and to a novice like myself it seems that it should work with a single chanter, but, for technical reasons that are explained by others in the Bob Dunsire thread, it doesn't.
DjUntzUntz
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Re: Pinchbeck smallpipes

Post by DjUntzUntz »

Hi Ckrusor,

Thank you kindly for your input. I do not follow the dunshire forums yet but i'll most certainly will now. I will check out your links
and see what other information I can get.

I'm glad to hear Pinchbeck pipes were well received. My music expertise isn't good enough either to switch between all kind of keys and chanters to get different kind of tunes out
but the ETR gives it an opportunity to learn over time. Even with traditional drones there would be no problem for me. I playing in A and D.

Again, thanks alot for the input! i'll go read those articles.

Kind regards
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