Overblowing drone reeds

[Little Green Man]

Hi. I'm new to the forum and wondering if anyone can help me. About a year ago I accidently made an overblowing tenor drone reed and I have never managed to make baritone or bass reeds to complete the set since then! It's really quiet and very stable- just what I wanted, although I would prefer it to be more buzzy. It has more of a whistle sound so I guess some harmonics are being suppressed. It's not like the Woofe type of reed. I made it from a drilled-out pencil with a bit of razor blade for the tongue.. Dimensions are 47mm length, 0.24 bore (approx) Vibrating part of tonge is 12.5 x 3.5mm and 0.1mm thick with a bit of blu-tack added. The drone (which is rushed) gives d when the slide is almost falling off. It might not be overblowing of course but I guess it is 'cos it has a deeper note than my tenor reeds usually have ( it sounds the fifth above the d). Any ideas anyone? I'm hoping its not a magic reed as I would prefer a workshop solution to this problem rather than wondering around looking under stones.

[djm]

All the stuff I have for drone reeds uses a tongue of cane, sugar pine, or plastic. I don't recall ever seeing anything about using a metal tongue like a razor blade. This moves you out of the norm for guills and into concertina reeds. Have you tried changing you tongue material?

djm

[Chris Bayley]

Model shops often sell small diameter tube, thin metal strip and small sheets of brass aluminium and copper as well as a variety of sizes of thin plastic. These would seem better than playing with razor blades and pencils.

Metal reeds have been used in the Northumbrian Small Pipes - Tom Clough is credited with their invention. Problems have occasionally occurred with these due to corrosion. Plastic reeds have been around for a almost a century if you take the highland pipes into account. Problem is getting them to be stable in both octaves with the Uilleann Pipes.

Bechonnet - (French Bagpipe Maker) used iron tongues on wooden bodies

You could also try a plastic body with a cane tongue.

And with regard to natural materials - it's the elder picking season.

Chris

[AlanB]

And with regard to natural materials - it's the elder picking season.

Chris

I read a post about a difference between inland and coastal elder? Anyone care to comment?

Alan

[John S]

Over blowing of Drone reeds is a real pain in GHBs but I think I know one of things that make it more likely.
Drone reeds are not always cylindrical and if the taper narrows towards the Drone end over blowing is much more likely to occur.
So if you want yours to over blow consistently I would consider using a slightly conical tube.
Remember that the Drone will over blow a 12th, G for a D drone.

TTFN

John S

[Little Green Man]

Thanks for the replies guys. I have used a variety of materials including mahogany for tongues. Leaving "magic" reeds aside, I find that metal bodies with cane tongues give the best overall results - long and strong tongues for stability and thin tongues for tone. Metal tongues on thick- walled wooden tubes seem to be the quietest. Mention of concertina reeds reminds me that that I recently saw someone playing a Chinese "booha" (or something like that) It looks like a flute but has a free reed in it - a great sound - something like a long northumbrian chanter. I wonder if anyone has tried fitting a free reed to a bagpipe drone?

[Brian Lee]

Arwe you sure it wasn't a Chinese Dizi flute? They use a sort of membrane across an open hole to resonate and sound something like a reed - but it's just the membrane - not a reed at all. Though the sound is somewhat similar.

[DMQuinn]

The instrument the Little Green Man is referring to is indeed a flute-like instrument with a free reed. It is called bawu, but the w in the pinyin transliteration is perhaps misleading. It comes out as something like bah oo.



In its simplest form, it has no keys, and has a range of one octave, or in some forms, a ninth, depending on how many finger holes are made in the bamboo body. The reed operates in an overblown mode throughout its normal range, but it is the only mode available, so from a player's point of view, it does not "overblow." The first mode does not produce what are considered musical sounds, only something between a groan and a squawk. (Much like some drones, come to think of it.) Relatively recently, the bawu's range has been extended by adding keys, in ways that suggest the Northumbrian scheme: two (or three) notes above the fingered range, and three or four below, so on a more modern instrument, the range is almost two octaves. If you've seen (heard) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you've heard the bawu being played to good effect.


Top to bottom: a keyed bawu, a keyless bawu, and a hulusi out of its gourd. (All three are wearing little velcro bands to protect their reeds.)

Offhand, I can't think of another free-reed instrument that produces more than one note from one reed, so the fact that you can actually get close to two octaves with a surprising dynamic range as well is remarkable. (O.K. There are other such instruments, but they are all in the bawu family, such as the hulusi.) That dynamic range, by the way, is probably why free reeds are not the thing for drones or "accordulators."

Here's what a bawu reed looks like up close:


And this is the reed in the little hulusi

[Joseph E. Smith]

Very cool! Thank you Mr. Quinn.

[djm]

That dynamic range, by the way, is probably why free reeds are not the thing for drones or "accordulators."

What does that mean? Would you expand on that for my simple mind? Since you only want one continuous note off a drone, a free reed would seem to be a simple solution. Similarly with regs - why not a free reed to each key?

Thx,

djm

[Little Green Man]

DJM, just a guess here but maybe its because free reeds can play loud and soft so that in the u.p. second octave the drones would be too loud for the chanter because of the higher air pressure. Perhaps the n.s.p. could be fitted with free reeds (both drones and chanter):- there's only one way of knowing and that would be to try it.

By the way, can someone tell me how to quote from other postings?

[djm]

I'm more interested in free reeds for regs than for drones.

I always forget the sequence for quoting someone. The way I do it is to highlight the block of text from wherever, paste it into a Reply box, highlight the text there again, and click on the Quote button. All this does is place quote tags at the beginning and end of the text block:

[quote]some text here[/quote]

If you want to include the originator's name or initials, add them as an attribute of the opening tag (note the quotation marks - they're important):

[quote="LGM"]

So why don't these show up as quotes in this post? There's a check box at the bottom of the Reply window called "Disable HTML in this post" and another called "Disable BBCode in this post".

djm

[Little Green Man]

Thanks, DJM.

[Jay-eye]

I'm more interested in free reeds for regs than for drones.

I always forget the sequence for quoting someone. The way I do it is to highlight the block of text from wherever, paste it into a Reply box, highlight the text there again, and click on the Quote button. All this does is place quote tags at the beginning and end of the text block:

some text here

If you want to include the originator's name or initials, add them as an attribute of the opening tag (note the quotation marks - they're important):

So why don't these show up as quotes in this post? There's a check box at the bottom of the Reply window called "Disable HTML in this post" and another called "Disable BBCode in this post".

djm

Alternatively there's the easy way: click the 'quote' button top right of the comment you want to quote from. That puts the whole lot as a quote in the post a reply box. Delete any bits you don't want, being careful to leave the square bracketted 'quotes' at the start and finish. Add your comments at the very end. Viola - as they say on the strings forum!

j.i.

[Little Green Man]

Thanks, Jay-eye.