I have six chanters, each one has its own personality, and they are all as finicky and temperamental as a Pipe Major on competition day. Chanters are not alike. Even if they’re from the same manufacturer, no two chanters are ever exactly alike, even the polypenco ones.

When I am playing my pipes with the group, my Lowrie, Bannatyne, Shepard and Gibson poly chanters seem to lock in tune when paired with the Colin MacLellan Senior reeds. These reeds have been a game changer for me, as they have the decency to play well straight out of the envelope with very little fine tuning. The fact that my ancient lungs no longer have to push air through a so-called easy-medium Souter, Shepard or a Melvin reed is a bonus, as I am nowhere near as sweaty and tired after playing a set.  

I sometimes will use my Campbell Tunable McCallum chanters (466 and 475), which tend to be pretty consistent with the stronger Easy MacLellan reeds, for solo and competition in order to keep my chanter in tune with my drones. 

Once I find where the reed is set for the chanter sweet spot, that tunable-fine tuning ability isn’t as big an issue as I believed it was. But it’s still nice to be able to really fine tune on the fly without taking the whole chanter out and repositioning the reed, or worse, wondering where all the tape slid to in the summer heat. 

Otherwise, especially for piobaireachd, I heavily favor my Chris Apps blackwood solo chanter with a MacLellan Easy reed, which also seems to do really well with the natural notes.

When it comes to reeds, here's what I've found:

Traditionally, I'd always used either Shepard, G1 or Souter reeds ... bands prefer the ridge cut versions because they tend to be louder and harsher than the smooth shouldered ones. They can also be responsible for bleeding from the eyeballs and bulging blood vessels in the face and forehead, too, which is why bandsmen furiously shave their reeds while pipe majors curse them and apply yards of tape. 

Recently, I'd read somewhere that molded, non-ridge reeds fare better than ridge-cuts for natural notes, so I picked up a bunch of the MacLellan molded Easy and Senior strength reeds. So far, the Easy MacLellan reeds in my band chanters seem to do really well without any sanding, shaving or clipping, and they've already been truly tested over a long string of gigs in a variety of chanters.

My current MacLellan reed in the Gibson chanter is a Senior strength, now approaching a year, and it settled in nicely and fast with little change in tone despite the punishment it receives in our Mississippi humidity and heat. Only now is it beginning to crow on a high to low hand drop, like E to A or G. It gets the mandrel if it gets worse, but I already have another reed I am playing in.

I find that, for my style of playing, easy-medium strength is the way to go. Too hard a reed, and you're not going to be able to maintain good pressure on it, let alone a continuous and stable note, or remain conscious for long. Too light a reed, like the senior strengths, and the natural notes tend to easily "blow out."

By "blow out" ... I mean that with too much pressure (I am still blowing hard and pressuring the bag hard in order to keep my drone tone stable), the lighter reeds are easily overwhelmed, thus the natural notes will cease to work, meaning it will sharpen and even crow, and you'll get a badly sounding C# or F# instead.

If you REALLY keep your pressure low, you can sometimes prevent the natural notes from blowing out, but really, this isn't all that feasible, because easing off too much makes the drones unstable. If you're needing to do this on the high hand a lot, the reed throat should either be opened with a mandrel (made a little stronger), or replaced altogether for a slightly stronger reed.            

All new reeds need to be played in for at least a week - in the chanter - in the pipes  - before deciding on keeping it, or ripping it up by shaving or sanding, or returning it to the box. Remember, it might sound marginal in one chanter, but in another chanter it will hit the sweet spot and sound brilliant without removing any wood. Once shaved or cut, the reed will not live long. 

Avoid sinking the reed too deep in the seat, because forcing a reed too sharp causes problems across the board  .. especially with F. There is a “sweet spot” in every chanter where the reed and the chanter agree. It takes patience, experience, work and sometimes adding extra hemp, sometimes stripping it off - and occasionally several different reeds - to find it, but once you do, that’s where the magic happens. The chanter becomes easier to sound, the reed sounds clear and true, and the music becomes melodic and joyful.

If after a few months of hard playing the natural notes are starting to fail - usually because the reed is getting too soft - you should try opening up the staple with a mandrel, before you start chopping the tops off the blades with a very sharp chisel. It might work, it might not. Don’t ever cut the reed until you’ve tried the mandrel, though. Shawn Husk has some great reed manipulation videos on youtube. Google it, I'm sure they'll come up.

Andrew Douglas of the Piper’s Dojo sends out amazing information to his subscribers fairly regularly, most of which I read and then bin, but there are several articles he has penned which are pure gold for the members of his blog. This, I believe, is one of those gold pieces. I have edited it down from a fairly lengthy description about making a bagpipe less of a beast to play, because an efficient set of pipes is an easy set of pipes, thus reducing effort to play and allowing us to perform longer and without tiring as fast. At my age, that’s a definite plus.

Aside from tackling the usual air issues like ensuring the stocks are firmly seated in the bag and tied in or sealed in; ensuring there is adequate hemp on the pins so they are airtight yet slide easily to tune without falling off or needing a wrench to move them; ensuring the zipper in a hybrid bag is appropriately greased; and finally that the blow stick is functioning easily with a large bore and a working flapper valve (whether it’s a brass and rubber tie-in, Li’l Mac, built-in like the Airstream valve, or installed in the stock like a Moose valve). 

I would also look at removing all the magic plumbing - the water trap systems and restrictor valves which choke off air flow to the drone and chanter, thus impairing the reeds from function fully - if you’re having issues even after checking for leaks. Lastly, getting the drones to sound as efficiently as possible with as little wasted air as possible makes the pipes super efficient and conserves the air in the bag while letting the reeds sound strongly. And so to Andrew’s advice.

Calibrating the Drones 

I believe that, with perhaps 1 or 2 exceptions, any set of drone reeds, when well calibrated, can sound great.

Calibration is the art of setting up your reeds to take the perfect, most efficient amount of air so that they work together to produce a stable sound. The bottom line is: It’s all about matching, as precisely as possible, your drone reed strength to suit the strength of your chanter reed. 

This idea is essential. Many times, we see students come in with reeds that are all taking different amounts of air, and all taking too much air relative to the strength of their reed. The result is a really loud, unsteady, un-tunable drone sound! Good maintenance is at the base of the bagpipe tree of sound. Therefore, achieving good tone and tuning is IMPOSSIBLE without a well-set-up bagpipe, with well-calibrated drone reeds.

To achieve the most efficient (and resultantly most "solid") set-up, the drone reeds need to be matched perfectly to the strength of the chanter. Why? Here are two big reasons:

One: A chanter that is too easy relative to the drones means by definition an inefficient bagpipe.

This one's easy - if the drones are more open than they need to be, that means you're using more air, more moisture, and more energy than you need to operate your bagpipe.

Two: Drones that are too "open" will be less steady, thus will be harder to tune.

The more open a drone reed is, the more they will change with changes in pressure. Therefore, they'll be harder to "lock" in with each other if they are more open than they need to be.

How to Calibrate

So, that was a quick explanation of why you need to calibrate. Now, let's get to how to do it. Here's how we suggest you calibrate your drone reeds.

Step 1

First, cork off your bass and a tenor (I typically cork the middle tenor). Play Low A on your chanter with the one drone going. Your drone reed should shut off when you blow too hard on your chanter. Now, gradually increase your blowing pressure until you know you're blowing too hard. Does the reed shut off? It should.

Here's why: If your drone reed shuts off when you blow too hard on your chanter, you know it's taking the minimum amount of air necessary when you're blowing normally. This is essential in trying to achieve an efficient bagpipe.

If your drone doesn't shut off, close it down by VERY GENTLY adjusting the bridle on the drone reed downwards away from the drone, towards the end of the tongue. Most synthetic reeds will only need the slightest adjustment (too much and the reed won't sound at all). If, by chance, your reed is shutting off too soon, adjust the bridle - again, VERY GENTLY - towards the drone, away from the tip of the tongue.

Note: if you aren't sure how to do this, be sure to have a teacher show you a couple of times. Drone reeds are expensive, so you need to be careful not to damage bridles or tongues in the process of adjusting them. It’s not hard, but it’s worth being shown a time or two. Repeat the process until the drone shuts off when you overblow your chanter.

Step 2

Ok, now that the first reed is calibrated, our objective is going to be to calibrate the other two drone reeds to the same strength of the first.

I disconnect and cork off the chanter, and then open up a second drone. Now, we'll gradually increase the pressure in the bag, in hopes that the two drones will shut off at exactly the same pressure.

Do they? If the "new" (recently opened) drone shuts off later than the first, you'll need to close it down a bit, by moving the bridle towards the tip of the tongue. If it shuts off too early, move the bridle away from the tip of the tongue. When they shut off at exactly the same pressure, then move on to the third drone and perform the same task.

The reason we want them to shut off at the same time is this: Obviously, the principle from above still applies - if all the drone reeds shut off when you blow too hard, that means when you blow normally, the reeds are taking the minimum amount of air. Now, we add in the extra step - if the drone reeds are all taking the SAME amount of air, that means they will all react the SAME to changes in blowing. They'll be steadier, stay in tune easier, and take on the same amount of moisture. Try it! It really works!

After this process, your pipes are guaranteed to be as efficient as possible. Cover your bases with good maintenance as well (sealing the zipper, wiping out the bag, checking the seals around the stocks, properly hemping pegs and joints, etc), and you’ll have a bagpipe as stable and efficient as the pros!

—Modified from a Piping Dojo blog entry by Andrew Douglas

When we started this blog, there was some discussion in the house about letting readers comment on the posts - moderation and protection of free speech, and commentary on the shortcomings and questionable intellectual abilities of the blogger - that sort of thing. Imagine my delight - sorry, my desolation - when I accessed the page permissions for the site this morning, and found out that unless I actually PAY for this site, I can’t activate comments.

Being Scots by heritage and by nature, this was a non-starter, so if my reader(s) wish to comment, he/she/it/they/never mind will have to use the “Contact Us” tab to express his/her/it’s/never mind outrage to me.  And if or when this site actually becomes popular (ha, ha, a dream) with Gulf Coast pipers and we start seeing an expansion of our group as a result, I might think about paying the fees to expand the site and hopefully feed the expansion.

My friends in the group have been tasked with picking the nits out of the site, so refresh it every time you visit to bring the latest edits up. Once the site has matured, Google says probably three months or so, then refreshing each time won’t be necessary. However, even the hawks among us can’t find every punctuation error and bad spelling given how busy we all seem to be, so if you spot something nittish that needs correcting, let me know through email, the comment section or just sidle up during practice and tell me - I’ll fix it ASAP.

Today, we will be at the St John’s Parish Hall at 3:30pm for the usual Sunday tragedy - dang it, I meant performance. We encourage you to visit and see what we are doing.

Practice on Wednesday is already posted under the “Our Location” tab on the site. —DOC