Another piper and I are fidddling around with making reeds for our B chanters. His is a Childress and mine a Patkos. We were comparing the reed crow pitch. Mine run from F# to a bit flat of that. His run from F# to G. so what is typical for B chanters? and if get a crow there will the chanter be about the right pitch (disregarding note variations note to note? I have also noticed that there are two ptiches to a reed crow. The quick suck pitch which is higher than the long draw pitch. Its hard to measure the quick one so these are the long draw pitches that i am refering to.
The two types of suck that I use to test reeds , and neither are short and sharp, are:
Suck 1. draw air through the reed as if you are pulling on a drinking Straw (closed throat)… you should be able to do this long enough to get a reading on a meter.. if you cannot then your reed is too hard. The note you need to get for any Flat (narrow bore) chanter is something close to the A note of that chanter ( A as if it were a D chanter) so about an F# for your B chanter. However, successfull reeds can be found that suck a different pitch (usually lower than the A) and work perfectly well… it is just that a good reed that has a sucked pitch close to the chanter’s A note will usually jump to and maintain the upper end of the second octave better.
Suck 2. draw air through the reed by breathing in with throat open… take the air straight down into your lungs… a gentle steady pull should produce a low gurgling note, very similar in pitch to Suck 1. but with a gentle rattling sound and no high pitched squeeks. The Squeeks indicate that the reed is too thick at some point in the scrape, or unbalanced from side to side.
The final pitch of a chanter relates, usually to its overal length. B chanters that are model’d on original instruments from the Golden Period…(first half of the 19th Century) will usually play C in Baroque pitch. Although Baroque Pitch is usually stated as being A=415hz. I think this is chosen by the Clasical Music fraternity because it gives a pitch standard one semitone below our current standard thus making life easy for those musicians who need to transpose on their modern pitched instruments so as to play with others using original instruments. In practice I have found that a pitch of between 409 and 407 hz. is more likely correct for pre-famine Irish Pipes. This gives the pitch at which Seamus Ennis’s pipes usually played.
So, unless you have a ‘corrected for modern conditions’ chanter , expect it to play 30- 45 cents flat of B.
Good luck.
Geoff.
Thanks Geoff… Exactly the info i was looking for. Interestingly enough my B chanter with my reed plays both Bottom and back D at about 40cents flat of B. i was going to trim it more but maybe I am there except for a bit of sanding to ease the playing.
Thanks.
Yes thanks Geoff! I am the other half of the conversation around ‘B’ reeds. And I, too, have just made my third working reed, one dead on pitch, this last one about 30-35cents flat of ‘B’ across the board, and one which remains a tuning mystery at the moment! (Although it sounds 'in tune with itself)
Thanks again for the support!
Arbo
happy to have been of some help. 