Chiff and Fipple Forums

Hi Benoît, I had a thread here about playing Fiddle tunes , you might find that of interest. For G minor you could just get a C chanter - or whistle - and finger them in A minor, of course. I wonder what pipers do to deal with these headaches. The only piping records I buy are from pure drop types, ...

I was just reading about Tommy's book, actually. $68, crikey. I'll be playing some tunes later today with a fiddling friend, maybe I can trick her into buying that...she's one of K. Burke's students, those lessons cost about the same.

Ditto, mine showed up yesterday along with a new Henry Taylor incannel gouge, which I take as some sort of sign. Was expecting delivery of the book in the fall. Read the Paddy Keenan section, very entertaining read. Had forgotten his rationale for wide brim hats - reflects the sound back to you, see...

Is the concertina site still a no-holds barred flamefest? I've read some of the threads there with these incorrigible snobs heaping abuse on Anglos, pretty funny stuff really. Figured out your reel: Sgt. Early's Dream, in E minor instead of the usual Dmin, or the Amin the Sarge himself would have pl...

Which tune are you trying to figure out the title of? The jig is Whelan's. Can't place the reel but it's familiar.

Please use box.net or soundcloud for these things, too, so we can listen to them without having to download the file and then open it.

My copper sheet for staples was originally flashing on a roof.

The Wheels of the World website. I pre-ordered a copy, it's due out in September, by which time the world may changed irrevocably, natch. Spendy little tome - about $50 to get it in the US - but looks like quite a monumental piece of work, 624 pages of overblown bellows blowing. This is the story o...

Schrunchy elastic bands for tying up a ponytail work a lot better than rubber bands for holding down recalcitrant keys, they don't break down over time. I don't know if a hobbyist's wood lathe counts as a household product but I've found my useful for all sorts of jobs, making plugs, bellows valves,...

A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of this documentary: COPPERS AND BRASS : The Piping Tradition of Irish Travellers Haven't had a chance to watch it yet, looks like a good flick. Some of those boys can really play, not just "bad flute playing" as their style's detractors used to...

You eventually need to add a bit more blu-tak from all the dust, yes. That's a small price to pay. How does your block work, KM? Is that leather on the bottom? I've cranked out about a dozen reeds with the block so far and they've sanded up fine, no bare spots. Sometimes I'll have to take the slip o...

http://media1000.dropshots.com/photos/1224915/20150601/b_023922.jpg Take a little square section block of wood, carve out a channel on one side, fill with BluTak. Voila, you can grab your slip of cane and it won't let go for nothing. No more licking digits! Ewww. :boggle: You can push like a son of...

Well, sometimes a bit of chanter adjustment is what it takes, unfortunately. Lots of presumably good chanters were "hosed out" in the past which is what we don't want, but presumably a person who is just making reeds not pipes isn't going to go the bother of building a reamer to enlarge th...

RORY PS To cure the high G reduce the staple eye. Pray tell why this might be so. I dont know ,its something I read in Dave Hegarty's book. RORY Actually in Dave's book he says to take the opposite approach - to cure flatness in both low and high G. Or at least he does in my copy, whichever edition...

I even tried putting a bit of rubber tubing on the new chanter top, which would approximate as large an inlet as is possible, and it still needed blown in a bit. I think it made things a titch louder too. Nothing empirical going on of course. The inlet to the chanter stock was a piece reducing the d...

I thought I'd use this thread to give some general pointers on tuning regs. For the wire attached to the tuning pin I use musical wire from hobby shops, this is very stiff stuff which has to be formed with a jeweler's pliers. I like it since it never loses shape, unlike bailing wire et al, and can b...