Thank you, Peter. That is what I get out of this whole mess. Now, Royce seems to claim that he checked around a bit, but I only hear remarks about the youngsters playing ability. Did anyone actually tell you he was a first rate repairman, Royce? And if you were going to send a valued chanter for repair/reeding why not send it to the excellent makers in this country whose reputation is without question?
I guess I agree that you got taken, and I am thankful to know by who. But your anger and repeated railing is, quite frankly, starting to dilute the rightness of your complaint.
I have long noted that in this forum we seem to be afraid to publicize who we think is good, and who we think is not. Personally, I would like to see more public venting on the subject. It would surely thin the hacks out a bit if they had to face the public review of their work.
Now, now, boys, play nice. I have never owned or used anything that wasn’t eventually scratched, torn, busted, or screwed up. Was I mad, hurt, discusseded (?) You betcha. I think sometime it took years off my life. Why I could hardly breath. I’ve sanded, buffed, polished, glued, touched up, epoxyed, prayed, and kept old junk, remembering how shiny, new, clean, perfect this thing was when I first got it. Some time when I’m looking thru my old junk I wonder why I even kept this old thing. If I stare at it long enough, I get mad all over again. Maybe some day some body will look as this stuff and say"I can fix this up to look brand new." Get your new chanter, the one you always wanted, the one made by the new masters, the new improved chanter, made with new, better tools, better wood, the chanter that stays tuned. But save your old chanter, some day mabe somebody can fix it.
Not entirely correct, but close. I’ve had a serious back problem and I really like codeine but other than that it was mostly just getting another computer rebuilt to run video a little faster. I had those sitting in the camera for a couple of months but with building the new computer and holidays and the medical woes it didn’t really have first priority.
I also had a dog who ate my cable connection and most of the plumbing in the basement which resulted in a flood. I resoldered the copper feeding the outside tap that the mutt yanked off by pulling the hose insanely hard all one afternoon till it let go inside, and the cable modem is still up because I’ve duct-taped the run all around the riser post of the back deck trying to get through the winter so it can be dug up again and replaced. But that’s another story. Let’s just say the dog isn’t around any more.
I can hear those desperate few out there trying to pry open that (formerly) black mailbox out by Area 51 digging down for anything but the most obvious and rational explanation, which as I said, I’d written this thing off as destroyed a year and a half ago and just wanted the Ivory back because I had an order pending with a serious maker that the return had been holding up.
I just bid my time and finally got around to transferring the video stills to the net, really, I have all year to piss those one or two people off who are simply going to be pissed off no matter what, and I’ve tried to learn to pace myself. I just see this as followup of an ongoing process, if it happens to irritate the guilty party and his apologists, well, that doesn’t hurt my feelings any.
But it will not hurt this party, it will make him stronger. It’s a lesson he can learn now with minimal discomfort at the cost of one marginal chanter and one customer he will likely never see in his lifetime anyway, or it’s a lesson in character he will never learn that will soon become an irreversible stumbling block.
I suppose the next “regurgitation” will come when I get the new chanter in, but that’s months away still. When that time comes, I don’t expect the destructive phase of this chanter’s rebirth need be a matter of discussion unless someone else raises it.
I had this bloodied and battered old O’ Dowd, formerly thought to be a Johnny Burke, in my possession for only a couple of days actually, when I finally got it back. I almost laughed at how botched the thing was. It was the most ludicrous thing I’d ever seen. The true horror of it doesn’t even come across on the .jpg’s because they came first from video and then were compressed heavily and reduced in size to fit the web.
My first impression was that it had been literally filled with automotive body putty in every note, and then each hole lowered pointlessly and mindlessly a third of an inch or so, and recarved with a screwdriver in attempt to make it tune with whatever reed the “repairman” actually did know how to make, rather than making any attempt at all to find a reed staple/design that would play in it as the maker intended. Then it looked like it had been thrown in a corner of an automotive workbench for two years to age its now grimy patina. I can visualize the alleged “craftsman” anchoring the thing firmly in the jagged jaws of a pipe vise (clearly visible) and then going at it with hands fresh off the Morris Minor’s motor mounts, using a 14" monkey wrench for a hammer and a 60 penny nail to drive out the pins.
In any case, I passed it around the next day I got it back, or maybe two days later at the local piper’s club so everyone could have a better idea what I was on about. Sort of a lesson on “How to totally destroy a chanter.” Then I had to put it straight in the mail because at that point I had a rough-bored chanter body resting away toward final turning and reaming, and I needed the maker of the new chanter to see if the ivory from the original could be removed successfully.
Oh yeah, Uh, anger? What anger. I guess people read their own mental states into things they get angry at reading eh? I was off base on couple of points and took a miss-informed guess at some rational scenario, some half-intelligent justification for not just giving me the allegedly worthless hunk of rubbish back. Especially when it was at the time claimed that the “repairs” had been a complete success and new reed was playing very well in it only a month after sending it. I apologise for being a little too pointed in my sarcasm and too broad in my brush-stroking for some, for underestimating the Irish it seems in the assumed universal ability to bear in kind the sort of “blarney” alleged to be their stock and trade. But really, that’s what happens when you leave an obnoxious, ignorant, ethnocentric, culturally insensitive yank deliberately, knowingly, willfully, and I think, maliciously, in the dark on a matter like this, for over two years.
Good point about my own skills. I usually just don’t bother to cover points like that to give the opening for you to come up with a provocative rebuttal those on the “con-Royce” side can imagine I hadn’t thought to pre-empt. It seems to aid in the “exchange of ideas.” But, if you’re as well-versed in this and all things “chanter” as you seem to suggest, you know yourself that a trained monkey with a tube of a/b epoxy and some blackwood shavings can move holes anywhere they want and all you need is some sandpaper, a smallish rat-tailed bastard file, a set of drill bits and a loose chuck to put clean, straight and true tone holes anywhere you want. And you should know that the chanter never had it’s biggest problem in the lower octave, if that was a problem at all.
You should also know that any ape with half-an ear can make the first octave of even the most horribly bored UP chanter play true. There is no trick in this. You can make great sounding pipes out of old plumbing and I’ve been doing it for 30 years. It doesn’t even have to be conical. It doesn’t even have to play a second octave.
The trick is really getting the second octave to both be as willing to sound and as true to play as the lower, and there, you see, my experience with Highland pipes (apart from also making three or four half-decent concert D UP chanters) wasn’t applicable to sort out the very odd behaviours of this particular chanter in the second octave. The person in question was in fact billed as a reedmaker, thus the fact that he made and played his own reeds and consistently won regional contests alone would seem to be credentials enough on that score. The fact that he claimed in his own web site to have never failed to get a chanter playing with one of his reeds, and the fact that he personally assured me he knew the chanter make well seemed to count in his favor. But that was two and a half years ago now and I’ve learned a lot since then.
He is known only to have been 18 or under, a fact only discerned later by great scrutinizing of local contest web sites. He looked older than that on the web site. He had a commercial web site promoting his reedmaking services, hosted by a noted Dublin music dealer and recommendations were made to me by same. So, when his name appeared on numerous pipe makers et al sites and the results of several contests were verified, I really couldn’t imagine anything more than a roll of brass in the throat, some rushing or maybe some undercutting or minor filling with wax or blue-tac or just tape.
He wasn’t actually hired to “repair” or “rebore” the thing, and “reboring” really has nothing to do with moving all the tone holes down anyway and opening up the bore or “reaming” it, as I surmised even then, was not what it needed anyway. He was billed as a reedmaker and he was paid to make a reed.
But, all that being said, he never came up with any reed at all and didn’t even return the one I sent, the one that already worked fine in the lower octave, and more-or-less in the upper octave as well. Now the chanter has no upper octave to speak of at all.
Maybe it’s some sort of strange, foreign cultural sensibility. It is not in my cultural ethos, somehow my responsibility the keep the “hirling” happy and just sit on my hands politely at his leisure, even when nothing is asked but the return of my own property in any condition in which he’s left it. It’s really this aspect of this exchange I find more fascinating than anything else. I shouldn’t have to ask this much. I should never have to demand it. My attitude shouldn’t enter into it, because I should have it in my hand and I should already be satisfied with this basic compliance. Sometime in my lifetime. But maybe that’s an uniquely American perspective.
And since you press the point, and as another has pondered: has anyone else out there ever had this guy make a reed for them? Has he ever actually made a reed that works up to snuff even for himself? Who really makes his reed for him perhaps? Just how bogus is this character? Show me in words and pictures and sound files his work at its best and I’ll give him his due. Why don’t his apologists rise to the fore and sing his praises here–it’s not like he doesn’t have his defenders here? Has he really made anyone a reed that worked?
It’s too bad his web site has been taken down.
As far as my comments in this forum being removed, how short is your own memory? You were one of the formost in absolutely insisting that I be censured and removed in this matter. You even protested in the first instance to the board moderator and the first post and thread was utterly killed on your own instistance among several others, by the board moderator himself. When following posts were made to comply more blatantly with forum policy, and thus became exempt from your complaints and the complaints of your comrades, within a few days, I myself just killed my own posts because, as I stated clearly, I myself thought the thread had passed any constructive point. For now I’ve simply put up more specific examples of my complaints, which you can take or leave as you will, as that evidence became available.
Now, had you and your friends not been so eager to silence my opinions, well, as you say, one might easily sort me out.
Be careful what you wish for next time.
You also seem reticent to note that his name has been removed from all the web sites of makers et al that would likewise make clear the sorts of claims he was making in terms of pitching his sales, and I hope you aren’t going to suggest his own web site said anything like: “Hey, I’m a school kid with no shop, no tools, no skill and no experience, send me your chanter and I’ll hack into it with gibbering abandon and then stick you with a bill and never send it back.” A number of people here and elsewhere have actually seen the site (formerly hosted by a very prominent musical empire/deal in Dublin) and they informed me (after this chanter had not been returned for over a year,) that in fact that he additionally had appropriated graphics and reedmaking manuals from another reedmaker’s site and pronounced them as if his own.
But then, that’s all been removed as well, otherwise, as you note, we might be able to better sort him out.
Actually, if I’ve put the name together correctly from the prior posts, the guy still has a website and he does advertise his ability to restore and modify others’ pipes.
