Flat high G fixes

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

What do you do to sharpen up high G? The Dave Hegarty book says wider or more open cats eye on the staple. Backcutting the tonehole helps according to Geoff W. I also recall being told about solutions involving the chanter top and back - removing the stop valve mechanism, wider inlet, even different bag shapes, or a longer/fatter neck? Part of Ken McLeod's rant against widebore sets was the T shaped inlet that the Taylors popularized, which I believe he said flattened the high G, unlike the early approaches of a gooseneck inlet, or tying the chanter straight into a bag stock, or right into the neck itself. I always wondered about those old concert chanters with monster inlet pipes, something like 10mm OD, just huge compared to the run of the mill which seems to be perhaps half that. Was this an attempted cure for a flat high G?

[geoff wooff]

Simplest cure , without changing the physical aspects of your chanter when everything else is about correct;

1. Measure how far your chanter reed protrudes from the stick and note this.

2.Remove reed and either throw it on the floor and stamp on it ( this will cure it for sure).... or measure the overal length of the reed, then carefully un-wind the wrap and move the staple further into the head by a small amount, perhaps 1 mm will be sufficient. Re-wind the wrap.

3. Replace the reed in the chanter to the exact protrusion length as noted in No.1. So the tips of the reed wil still maintain positional relationship to all the notes but now the internal cavity of the reed and space just below the reed will ( should) produce a sharpened G.

Of course this might affect other notes, particularly upper A and is not really the perfect cure but should suffice in most cases.

For a more 'in-depth' study of the problem... yes one could look at chantertops and feed situations.

Many years ago I thought to return my Harrington chanter to its original style of air feed ( which was Bag attached direct to a straight through chanter head, no stop key... I had made a replacement head with stopkey and swanneck due to the original item being cracked and too fagile for further service. Although the chanter did not have these tuning issues with the new head, and the reed I had made for it, as soon as I fitted the new longer bag and tied it directly ( discarded the swanneck) I had tuning problems... notably that I could not get the drones to agree with more than one or two notes at a time... being either correct to the D's or the A's or the G's.... a frustrating few days were encountered untill I gave up and replaced the swanneck.... all was restored and no more physical changes have been attempted these past 35 years. Of course I could have made a 'different' reed.... but peace was restored and that was enough!!

However, I feel that in the case of the Flat top G in certain models of Concert chanters this might be due to trying to force the pitch down from the pre-war standard of A= 452hz to the modern 440hz. By changing the reed head width and staple diameter it is possible to approximate the modern pitch with these earlier models but usually something is not quite right.

Of course it is possible redesign a chanter to alieviate such problems but I don't feel inclinded to tell the world how to do that this morning .

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

Thanks for the reply, Geoff. Didn't know the Harrington tied in straight originally, and it's surprising that the reed would vehemently protest being used in the original setup. I guess it's along the same lines as putting something into the bottom of a regulator bore, and the tone/volume/tuning changes a bit; or what you get when you lift the chanter off the knee. Minor but telling differences.

I thought to wrap a bit of a pipe cleaner around the bottom of my reed, like a shawm's pirouette; did nothing, far as I can tell. Made a ridiculously long extension to the chanter outlet from brass tubing and a little wood widget I turned out, will see what that's good for in a sec here. This is for an old concert pitch chanter, a Taylor style job. As these things go it doesn't work half bad playing at A=440. Bit of rush and wax in some of the holes, plays nice and light. I've been playing the same reed for 8 years now and don't want to risk untying it, occasionally I get off my duff and make or mess around with reeds but mostly just play the things, and was interested in other methods of sharpening that note. Incidentally my reed is out as far as it can go, pushing the head on further would necessitate a longer staple.

Also incidentally, the other day it occurred to me to get the file marks off a staple using my trusty belt sander, instead of the usual file; works a ton better, if you're lazy and clumsy like me anyway. Great for shaping mandrels, too.

[geoff wooff]

Kevin,
it looks like I gave you a generic answer to your question. What i suggested was what can be done and what usually happens however, your problem stems from another cause, as detailed in my penultimate paragraph above.

The main problem, from your description of the chanter, is that the original design will be happy at somewhere north of half a semitone sharper than modern standard pitch. Part of the attempt to bring it down in pitch will ,probably, have been to lower the reed head speed by scraping the head more. This is like trying to detune your fiddle past a certain point where the string gauges are no longer happy , too floppy. Likewise moving the reed out as far as it will go is like shifting the bridge of the fiddle towards the tailpiece.......

Although changing the physical shape of the hardware behind the reed, the head,feed tube and even the length of the plug in the bag neck ( and even the stiffness of the bag material), can have an affect on the tuning of some notes, I doubt it will correct octaving problems... mind you funnier things have happened!

Octaving is more to do with the internal volumes of reed and bore.

If you let that chanter come up to its happy pitch I feel sure it will start to octave properly. Finding out what that happy pitch will be is another matter AND if the chanter is a copy of an old one ( a taylor model you say ?) and was made by someone who expected it to be in modern D... then you are poking in the dark altogether !!!!!!!!!!!!!

There has been far too much of " the blind leading the blind" since the beggining of the current revival.

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

Oh yes, I have a rush in the bore and various holes waxed a bit too, and have had it happier playing sharp of concert pitch in the past. I know about the whole heavy reed + sharp chanter phenomenon, was just wondering about other approaches to fixing that one note, which is a real bugaboo, you had Clancy and Doran with superflat high Gs to cite two noted examples. I'd remembered these other cures for that note and thought I'd bring it up again. The other notes on my chanter around G are perfect, too.

Here's the chanter in question:



I made a chanter top yesterday with a spare gooseneck inlet I had lying around, no real change there. I still wonder about those giant OD inlets, I'd think somebody would have tested all of these variables by now. Hughes and McLeod tried all kinds of things as I recall, such as bags the size of airships or chanter tops made out of clear plastic, all in the name of science. Also Pat McNulty did a bit of research in the 70s into the acoustics of pipes.

Maybe I'll jam up the chanter inlet with a wood plug with dinky diameter ID, see what happens, perhaps that will make it worse.

[Torrin Riáin]

In one of the pipemaking videos on pipers.ie, DMQ specifically mentions that he has made brass chanter tops with larger feed tubes which "has a surprising effect on the second octave G of concert pitch chanters" and that it "makes it a little bit sharper, which can be an advantage if you happen to have a chanter with a flat second octave G."
I'm assuming that this is tested for chanters that were designed in a440 though, not sure what it would do on one that is designed sharper than that.

It's also possible that narrowing the eye of the staple slightly would also sharpen the G. I've had success with this particular method, although I took a more cautious approach than Finbar Furey's, which involved a hammer...

[geoff wooff]

Indeed Kevin,
that chanter head feed does look a little constipated. I normally use a 3/8" tube on my swannecks .

In the same way that the scale of a regulator can be adjusted by changing the stopped length of the vibrating column perhaps by finding the ideal head length (reed cap volume) you might effect an improvement to that flat top G.

Now all you need is a test rig to help find the ideal sizes. A simple rule is that when a volumetric constriction is suspected of causing a problem and increasing the size of the space has proved to make an effect then any continued increase beyond a crittical point will afford little or no further change.

So thinking about your point Torrin, it is probable that the causitive factor in this is the 'stopped length ' of the reed cap, and that effect being somewhat alieviated by the enlargement of the feed tube. A long Head with a moveable stopper ( and moveable feed position ?) would make an interesting test rig.

Have fun,
Geoff.

[rorybbellows]

The thing that strikes me about instrument makers in general is that they really dont know what they are doing.The whole industry is based on copying what has gone before and years of empirical experimentation that mostly produces dubious results . I'm not trying to put any one down here but although some makers make great instruments they really dont know on a theoretical level how they work.

RORY

[geoff wooff]

The thing that strikes me about instrument makers in general is that they really dont know what they are doing.The whole industry is based on copying what has gone before and years of empirical experimentation that mostly produces dubious results . I'm not trying to put any one down here but although some makers make great instruments they really dont know on a theoretical level how they work.

RORY

Those fellows clever enough to 'know' how these instruments work have found their way into employments that actually pay properly ( rocket science for instance)... the rest of us just have to fuddle along because we love the things.

Much is still done by "suck it and see" methods, in fact most knowledge is obtained that way. Examples; Barnes-Wallace's bouncing bomb or Alexander Fleming's Penicillin discovery.....

Most of us don't know 'how' but some of us know 'what'..... and usually that is enough.

There is equally as much luck as judgement involved, that is true but, those who would be Pipers should think themselves lucky that some crazy people have spent the last 40 years pulling their hair out trying to make the things... with out them there would be no revival, no corporate NPU , just a poverty of pipers trying to play the few real sets that survived .

Easy enough to poke fun at people from a distance

[oliver]

I totally agree Geoff.
There are great debates on the French forum about that at the moment, and apparently, there are a lot of different factors involved which may bring about this conclusion : there's no theory... or at least the pipes are reluctant to it...

[tompipes]

The thing that strikes me about instrument makers in general is that they really dont know what they are doing.

That's a terribly misinformed thing to say and who are these instrument makers you speak of?

There is the case of the man who stands at the CNC lathe in a factory in France who presses a button and a clarinet pops out.
I'll presume this isn't the instrument maker you speak of.
Neither Mr Selmer nor Mr Bundy stood at a lathe all day making reamers. They sat in the office counting money and paying bills. Same could be said for Mr Rudall and Mr Rose. Where they unaware of their actions too?

If anything, modern independent solo makers are more educated in the ways of acoustics and instrument design than the mid 20th century makers, especially since the work of Benade and others have been published.

Tommy

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

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 diameter back down to standard so perhaps that affected the high G all over again, but the tubing was about a foot long...you'd think it would be a non-issue. Weird.

With the old top I can get high G right in tune by lifting the bottom hand entirely off, handy in airs. I had another chanter where you'd get it by playing F# and opening the G# key. Whatever works, eh?

[rorybbellows]

First of all, I wasn't poking fun at anybody or even criticising, I was just stating an observation.

That's a terribly misinformed thing to say and who are these instrument makers you speak of?

If anything, modern independent solo makers are more educated in the ways of acoustics and instrument design than the mid 20th century makers, especially since the work of Benade and others have been published.
Tommy

I would think the vast majority of instrument making dont really understand what controls the sound that comes from the finished instrument.One example is the failure of violin makers who have been trying to reproduce the quality of Stradivarius violins.
Another example closer to home is the stabbing in the dark method when it comes to problem solving , if the workings of the instrument were really understood ,that wouldn't be the case.
The question is, can science be applied to instrument making ? Benade may have written about the physics involved but have instruments got any better for it.
I.m sorry I dont speak French, I'd be interested what they have to say on the French website Oliver spoke of,after all France is the historical home of woodwind development.

RORY

[oliver]

I would think the vast majority of instrument making dont really understand what controls the sound that comes from the finished instrument.One example is the failure of violin makers who have been trying to reproduce the quality of Stradivarius violins.
RORY

This is of course not true. Modern violin makers are able to make violins as good as the Strads, and for far less expensive. Strads are just victims of legend and speculation. Not all great violin virtuosos today play a Strad or Guarneri, far from it, some have recently made violins and you wouldn't notice any difference.
For example, although Anne Sophie Mutter owns two Strads, she also has two modern violins : a Finnigan-Klaembt dated 1999 and a Regazzi, dated 2005. Don't forget either that some of the Strads were modified after 1955, when 440 hertz was chosen for a standard A, the old instruments had not been conceived for such a high tension of the strings.

A very short conclusion of what's going on on the French forum is that theory is not enough, experience and adaptation can't be replaced. For instance, Mr Froment used to smell pieces of cane before making a reed, and decide on the spot to take one and not the other, knowing "instinctively" which one was the best...

[Driftwood]

Don't forget either that some of the Strads were modified after 1955, when 440 hertz was chosen for a standard A, the old instruments had not been conceived for such a high tension of the strings.

That's a bit misleading, Oliver. Many Strads underwent major surgery in the 19th century when they were given longer, raked-back "modern" necks. That really did rack-up the string tension, as it was meant to do. And it happened to many violins, not just Strads. In more recent times pitch has gone up and down but string tension as a function of pitch can also be adjusted by the choice of string, especially the gauge.