brianholton wrote:
I have one of Donald's chanters. I haven't had much time to get to grips with it, but, while it plays beautifully as a normal 9-note chanter, the extended range fingerings will take time to get used to. I guess it's a similar level of difficulty to moving from a smallpipe chanter to a Northumbrian one.
At the moment I'm still working on the low F, G, E and D, using the right thumb and the left pinkie. The tricky thing seems to be covering the back holes without having the top ones leak.
Donald's notes on his website are copious, and I will need to look at them again before I try the high notes. I seem to recall that top b, c, and d involve changes in bag pressure, but don't quote me on that.
The left-hand chromatic notes that use the fleahole work beautifully, but I'm less convinced by the right-hand ones: this may be down to me, of course. it's early days yet.
b
It would seem that Julian’s Chanter would be easier to learn. The addition of the speaker key makes it very intuitive. I’m not sure how the jumping of the 12th is handled, I’m still unclear on that. I imagine it would be like on the clarinet.
On my pastoral pipe the speaker key makes it jumps into the next octave like a saxophone, so it’s very easy to play between the two octaves.