Re: When does a cylinder become a cone?
Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2016 4:26 pm
Absolutely!When makers speak of 'voicing' a chanter, they are often modifying the chanter to their 'standard' reed.
And all the reedmaker job consists to refind this particular way of making a reed.
And I'm pretty sure An Seanduine's method of checking the reed by means of how it crows gives to the confirmed maker a huge amount of information, probably very difficult to synthetise in an informatic progam. (many of us are able, after a few years of practising, to know if the reed is sharp or flat without even trying it in the chanter. We can deduce very precise things from this simple check.)
I think that what we need is, as previously said, a correct representation of all the parameters defining the reed head, and how they act together.
This is the first step to be achieved, and there's still a lot of work to do in this area. (I have allready written all I know on the subject, but it is a thirty page draft, in french...). The job has to be shared with as many makers as possible, to be sure the conclusions are correct.
Then the scientific part could come into action, trying to simulate things, in order to spare time in the empiric research.
But I'm inclined to believe that mere empirism could eventualy come first at the goal...