At one point I was heavy in to reed making. Left it… and now I’m starting to want to feel autonomous again. D’nno if that’ll have me "leaivng it " again,…anyhow:
I had a C reed. worked well. 2nd oct A was sharp. i wasn’t about to take the reed apart, make a new staple, or rush the staple. Instead I did the 3rd best thing and closed the staple down…w. a vice. The A’s were locked and great sounding. the back d went south. After doing all i could to save the reed..I once again rambled down the road of ruin.
when I did an autopse on the reed, I noticed what i did to the staple. there was no longer a taper. It went from round to squished. (At some point I’ll hammer that out witht he mandrel and put a new head on it for experiment sake.)
Question: what is the connection between staple taper/or staple and the back D? Does the 2nd oct A need to be a wee bit sharp to allow the back d to be in place? If the a’s are perfect, and the g’s are bearable and the back d is still flat, does that point to the bore or the placement of the back d?
You can run, but you can’t hide. You’re one of us now.
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Question: what is the connection between staple taper/or staple and the back D? Does the 2nd oct A need to be a wee bit sharp to allow the back d to be in place? If the a’s are perfect, and the g’s are bearable and the back d is still flat, does that point to the bore or the placement of the back d?
If there’s a straightforward answer to your first question I sure don’t know it. If anybody does, please speak up! As to your second, I don’t think there needs to be a tradeoff in principle.
My suggestion about the sharp A would have been to reduce the size of the upper staple - which you’ve succeeded in doing (‘crunch!’). Perhaps doing this in a way that preserves the reed head volume a bit more would spare the back D, or perhaps just trimming or scraping the reed less would have brought the back D up. So many variables… I don’t think it makes sense to implicate the chanter design after only a couple of attempts
My current approach is to try and get the staple “right” first, then mess about with reed head dimensions. Of course they aren’t really independent, so you may find yourself re-thinking the staple if you drift too far from your starting point WRT head width, length, etc.
As for the tuning of G and A with respect to the rest of the scale, Geoff Wooff has reported that making the staple eye more open flattens the “middle notes”, and closing it sharpens them (relative to the rest of the scale). In practice this may mean flattening “both ends” of the scale, i.e. the back d and the bottom D, I don’t know, and I am not sure this works for concert pitch, but it’s worth trying. In any case the staple eye not only affects the back d’s tuning and stability (not always the same way), it also changes the tuning of A and G. I’ve found that a different staple eye size can sort out chronically flat G’s, for instance.
I had a conversation years ago with Geoff Wooff and he told me that we’ve got it ALL WRONG! We have think of tuning the Bottom Octave to the Second Octave, and not the other 'way 'round. Well I had worked on a chanter reed of his, in a complete Wooff C set, belonging to the Kiwi piper, David Kidd, then living in Sacremento, California. I took the reed apart to tie on a new reed head and I looked at the LARGE eye and I said to David, “This can’t be right, the eye is too open!”.
Well I flattened the eye to 1/16th short axis (in height) and 3/16th across the long axis (width), tied on the reed head and voila… every note was good…
EXCEPT the back D, which sank down, down, out of sight…and hearing!
In a subsequent conversation with my best student, Ted Anderson, Ted confirmed that the staples of Geoff’s sets ARE more OPEN EYED! I think that his narrow bores are narrower than the slightly bigger bore C sets that other makers use (following Rowsome or whom-ever patterns). So I also think Geoff (and the old pipe makers he copies) is giving a boost of air to compensate for the too quiet, smaller bore SOUND. I have played around with the staple eye varible and there is very narrow window of
“opportunity” of it “firing off” just right, in the cone. Too narrow an eye not enough air to sound. Too large, the air just whistles through… the “Goldilock’s Golden Mean” means: when making the staple “get to that perfect opening, as fast as you can!” AND Don’t forget to check your hat!
Sean Folsom
The other day I fished out my copy of Ledet’s Oboe Reed Styles, after making SO MANY REEDS, agggh, and TRYING OUT NEW METHODS TO BOOT, accckkk.
Anyway this book has photos of reeds, profiles of each player and often info about their making style, and fully detailed dimensions of their squeakers. Inside diameters of staples at the eye are given, both short and long axis. The median (average) diameter there is 1.90mm = .075" (rounding up) but widths go all the way up to 3.05mm = .12" - only one instance there, 2.1mm = .082" was more popular - and down to 1.5mm = .059". Head widths for oboe reeds are very narrow, however - median is about 7mm = .28". Narrow compared to what we make - narrow bore UP reeds hang around 10mm = .40" or so. Average staple length is 47mm - which Wooff recommends for narrow D, I believe, and Angus as well.
I don’t know about air, seems like if the staple is too wide it will be impossible to get the blades to close down. Or too easy - the staple will jam the blades closed shut, and you won’t be able to scrape the cane down enough?
Waddya mean, “too quiet”? Maybe for vaudeville!
I mean…how quiet is too quiet…
Shhh…
I’m going to try some “compound scraping” with my next reeds - start out with a wider blade scrape to get the blades to close down, then scrape more out of the middle to get the reed to sound.
