Eagach wrote:
the fact the 2 tenors are different intriguing, would you say it's down to manufacture tolerances or deliberate?
With these new MacRae reproductions by McCallum it's deliberate, because the vintage pipes they copied were like that.
With vintage pipes we have no way of knowing
why those long-dead makers did the things that they did, unless one of the makers wrote about it. I haven't seen anybody mention finding such writings.
Oh we can make all the guesses we want! But we can't
know. I first encountered the unmatched tenor thing when I bought an old set of Henderson pipes back in the 1970s.
The owner, a piper in the Royal Scots, had played them in WWI. After the war he moved to California, where he died in 1928. His widow had just died, hence the sale. The daughter told me that as far as she knew the pipes had been sitting in their box up in the rafters in the garage since 1928. They were selling them for $150.
Months later, when I measured all the bores, I found that one tenor was slightly smaller in EVERY spec. The bottom section bore, the tone chamber, the upper bore, the bush.
This occurs on many c1880-c1930 "classic" pipes, and the difference between the two tenors is so regular that it seems calculated and deliberate.
The result is that one tenor is slightly softer than the other.
The question is: does the soft tenor go in the middle, so that the volume of the two tenors is balanced from the perspective of the player?
Or does the soft tenor go on the outside, so that the volume of the two tenors is balanced from the perspective of the listener?
I've yet to hear anybody but me ask that question, and so far there have been no answers.
You might say "what difference could it make? The tenors are close together."
Well, we put them close together now. It was not always that way. Back when Peter Henderson and David Glen and Robert Lawrie were alive and making pipes the fashion was to have the drones further apart.
Like these guys. The outer tenor is pointing straight at the audience. Makes sense for that tenor to be more mellow, no? Not buzzing straight at the ears of the listeners?


