Playing a chanter without bag or bellows?

[The Sporting Pitchfork]

Tony-

Where'd you get that thing? From a proctologist?!

[Royce]

Thanks. You are indeed answering my questions. The main issue is cost, and though I plan to have a good set fairly soon, everyone has warned me away from the cheap mouth-blown practice chanters. "Expensive firewood", etc.
The main trouble I'm hearing is that moisture from my mouth will quickly cause intonation troubles. The other question not yet addressed is the tone: I have a GHB practice chanter (with synthetic reed) and though the sound vaguely reminds me of pipes, it is a thin, anemic, whiny little sound not suited for anyone to hear.... purely for "practice" only. Does the UP mouth-blown chanter sound okay on its own?
Again, it's not a space issue... plenty of room in the bedroom studio... but a desire to get started after 6 months of reading, setting aside funds only to have them needed elsewhere, etc.

A plastic reed is a plastic reed and it will always sound like a plastic reed even if you don't mouthblow it. That and the fact that the cheap, mouth-blowers are strictly for investigation or maybe practice, and thus not really musical instruments, leaves you with the proposition of experimentally buying a good chanter, fitting it with a plastic reed that won't sound nearly as good, rigging a hose and mouthpiece, and then hoping it holds up to the moisture with out exploding--if you want it to sound "as good as..."

But uh, maybe what you're really thinking of is trying out the thing on the cheap, and I'd recommend the Daye Penny Chanter semi-assembled practice set for that instead, for not much more money. The other little secret is, if you can mouthblow your UP up into the second octave, either you're a former Highland piper, or you're playing a pretty weak reed.

But really, why don't you just get a practice set and learn the bellows. It's not as hard as all that.

Royce

[oleorezinator]

No! Uh-uh! That would be BAD!!!

There's a reason why these things come attached to a bag and bellows and it's not just to make us pipers look funny.

Unlike their mouth-blown retarded cousins, uilleann pipe reeds are very sensitive and could rot if exposed to hot, wet, dirty, nasty, acidic, slobbery, bacteria-riddled human saliva and lung vapor. If you blow your won reed, you will go blind and insane.

nice one sport. you hit the nail on the head.

[AlanB]

The other little secret is, if you can mouthblow your UP up into the second octave, either you're a former Highland piper, or you're playing a pretty weak reed.

Royce

Little secret, my arse! I am neither of the above. Can still do it though........ Easily..........And I'm a smoker.............

Hey, all of you, blow down your chanters and let us know how you get on........


Alan

[Uilliam]

Thanx Alan I wondered where I put that £10 note
I must have been a Highland piper in a previous life because when I whistle doh rah me soh etc I can reach the 2nd octave!!!!
How a about a whistling band??

[Joseph E. Smith]

David Daye's penny chanters are certainly a great idea as well as being a good instrument and the lower price is absolutely an advantage. Pat Sky is also offering practice sets for a reasonable sum. Both are excellent ways to experiment/begin 'without selling the farm'. They are also compatable with other pipes and/or 'trad' instruments. As you see, nonshinchan, there are options a'plenty that will see you on your way and get you started at a higher level than a mouthblown practice chanter. More importantly, they will aid you in developing bellows/bag/fingering skills that are essential to playing the UPs correctly. But follow your own path, if the mouth chanter is the way you want to go, I am in no position to dictate nor belittle you for your choices. Hell, I have got enough on my own plate to deal with in that arena, that it would be somewhat assinine of me to slag anyone else for their decisions.

[Royce]

The other little secret is, if you can mouthblow your UP up into the second octave, either you're a former Highland piper, or you're playing a pretty weak reed.

Royce

Little secret, my arse! I am neither of the above. Can still do it though........ Easily..........And I'm a smoker.............

Hey, all of you, blow down your chanters and let us know how you get on........


Alan

Well then, stick a hose on it, and blow (preferably circular breathing) for a three hour session and see if you're such a smart arse afterward. You see, when we're talking about reasons why you want a bag on your pipes and discussion making a fully functional musical instrument out a UP chanter with a hose on it, feeling proud that you can make noise for a few bars up to high A is pretty feeble expectations of either yourself or the "musical instrument."

So go rig up the hose, and play through a few jigs and reels, making sure not to breathe (or circular breath) until you get to the end of a line or phrase, and then don't miss a note sucking air for the next run, and let me know if you still think it's really as easy and practical as you seem to suggest.

You see, when I, and many other GHB (well I'm basically a former GHB player at this point, reluctantly trapped in the culture) players sit down at a practice table with a practice chanter (roughly like blowing your UP chanter) I play nonstop through 5-7 minute sets all night long without taking a pause, because I circular breathe. That gives you a constant and reliable instrument and frankly, those little practice pipes with the little practice chanters on them are for people who can't circular breathe, and if you'd just learn to use a standard GHB practice chanter properly, with circular breathing, you'd have a lot less of these little hornets cluttering up the marketplace.

So, if you think it's easy to blow your UP chanter through a hose nonstop through a session, can circular breath it up into the upper octave easily without a pause, then I owe you a pat on the back. I'd even give you credit for being able to play all night flute or whistle style by taking on air only at phrase breaks so the tune is continuous and uninterrupted. It wouldn't be much of an UP style, but it would work I suppose.

But if you're crowing because you can take a test puff like anyone else and play the upper octave to check out the reed setting a bit, that's not really much of a trick on UP. You're right about that.

Royce

[AlanB]

Now, if you'd said..

<if you can blow your UP chanter through a hose nonstop through a session, can circular breath it up into the upper octave easily without a pause, then I owe you a pat on the back.>

or

<<stick a hose on it, and blow (preferably circular breathing) for a three hour session and see if you're such a smart arse afterward.>>


but you didn't.................

Alan

[Dionys]

Well at least Royce has confirmed what we all know. Royce Blows.
All in fun, Royce! This board would be much less colorful without ya.

Dionys

[JoeKrepps]

Has anyone tried Song of the Sea's mouth blown practice chanter?
Take a look at: http://www.songsea.com/uwc.htm
Is there any merit to this design? Does it look better than the Pakastani chanter?
I'm looking for a cheap way into UP but I don't wanna' spend a truckload of cash. I've been playing a Kerry low whistle in D so I'm getting used to the "piper's grip".

Thankee,
Joe
P.S. sorry if this is wandering off-topic

[Dionys]

Funny thing, that. The Uilleann Whistle Chanter sounds like.. well.. a whistle. David Daye's practice set (if you build it) is cheaper/around the same price/slightly more expensive (depending on if you buy a kit from Dave, buy the tubing yourself, &c) and you get to learn to use bellows & bag.

The UWC site makes UP playing sound terribly difficult. To become a master, that's true. To master the basics of bellows/bag usage in conjunction with fingering isn't as hard as they make it out to be.

It's a simple thing. If you love the sound of the Uilleann Pipes, go ahead and jump in at whatever level you can afford, from David Daye's inexpensive sets to a high-end maker's expensive practice set. If it turns out you don't like the actual playing, practice or sound and you've bought from a reputable (or especially well known/respected) maker, you'll likely recoup your costs or your costs minus the $100 you might otherwise spend on something like the UWC.

Dionys

[Pat Cannady]

If you want to give the Evil Octopus a shot, save your money, get on a good pipemaker's waiting list and play the whistle or the flute in the meantime.

The hardest part of uilleann piping for beginners is not and should not be the fingering - it's coordinating bag AND bellows AND fingering. If you can get around on a whistle or a flute, the pipe chanter scales are not difficult to master.

What is truly difficult about the uilleann pipes is that you have to train yourself to not think about keeping the bag full of air while feeding a steady flow of air to the reed, producing a constant, steady tone, while articulating on the chanter using ONLY ornamentation and the various fingering possibilities - and that's just the first octave.

To move to the second octave, you have to push the bag 15-20% harder and sustain that pressure as long as the tune requires, articulate the melody cleanly, then back off of the bag to drop back to the first octave, oh, and by the way, feeding the bag with the bellows while playing the whole time.

While all of this is going on, your attention should be on the tune itself and not on all the maneuverings required to play it. If you're playing in a session, you need to listen to others and adjust to them if needed, keeping a steady pace. It's impossible to do this if your bag and bellows work is still taking up a lot of space in the front part of your brain - you have to get beyond thinking about it and just do it.

Seen in that light, the Uillean practice chanter concept is largely a waste of time and money because a) it won't teach you to coordinate bag and bellows, and b) you can train your fingers to play a lot of piping ornaments and tunes using a standard $8 Generation-style whistle.

The good news is that if you can manage that kind of coordination, adding drones is not difficult by comparison. Adding regulators is another matter, but not insurmountable. People learn to play these things after all, it just takes time and dedication.

edited to include the following: I don't mean this to make the pipes sound more difficult than they are. They do require a lot of work from a beginner though but if you're stubborn and practice every day, seek instruction from experienced players as often as possible, and fill your head with irish music (not just piping) you will improve, you will be able to do this. How long this process takes is up to you.

[Lorenzo]

Well put, Pat. The only thing I could add to that fine description is that if you buy a practice set from a well known maker, you can usually recover your money if you find the UPs aren't for you. If you don't get a good set to begin with, you may never know if they're for you or not, at least it may retard your education for years...and that can only fester dispair, and some have actually turned to the blues for comfort and became harmonica players, and accordian!

Just remember: an excellent set of uilleann pipes = an excellent opportunity to exercise fair judgement and analysis of the instrument. Anything less will give you a less accurate impression of both the instrument, and your ability to play it. There really are people who have played certain sets for 10-20 years that still have no idea how much easier playing the pipes can be.

[No E]

...I'm looking for a cheap way into UP but I don't wanna' spend a truckload of cash. ...
Thankee,
Joe

See my post about Patrick Sky making practice sets for $600... you'd be hard-pressed to do better than that for the money.

No E

[Royce]

Has anyone tried Song of the Sea's mouth blown practice chanter?
Take a look at: http://www.songsea.com/uwc.htm
Is there any merit to this design? Does it look better than the Pakastani chanter?
I'm looking for a cheap way into UP but I don't wanna' spend a truckload of cash. I've been playing a Kerry low whistle in D so I'm getting used to the "piper's grip".

Thankee,
Joe
P.S. sorry if this is wandering off-topic

Eddie Van Damme ain't gonna be happy with me, but, not really a solution to the problem, except it is cheap. I had one of the "Lark" mouthblown practice UP setups for a hundred bucks and got that on a "lark" instead of the whistle. But both are intended to introduce a prospective piper to the fingering and rough feel of the instrument. I haven't played the whistle, so I can't rebutt any of my persecutors just lying in wait to pose the question, "Just how do you know if you haven't played one...?"

I will suggest conceptually that it may have some merit as its own instrument, but could not have a great deal of use as an interchangeable practice instrument for UP for a host of reasons already debated.

But I have tried the mouthblown UP things, two of them. One of them was an hairy, wood thing made out of recycled orange crates dyed brown I think it was. Run away. Run away.

The other was the injection-molded plastic device sold by Lark in the Morning, and it played reasonably well on a cut-down, sanded, and staple-extended plastic Highland practice chanter reed. I'm not sure who makes these, but they started out making practice chanter based GHB practice pipes, and the external moldings of the UP chanter are the same, with a thin little neck and big honkin' cylindrical foot on the bell end.

If you stick a bag on this thing, and make your own plastic reed for it, it plays pretty well. I was surprized. If you try to play it in any extended, serious way however, as in a session or on a road trip, you blow your cheeks out within a few sets and it's more work than playing Highland pipes. It's like if you had your first Highland practice chanter with that brick of a crap reed that leaked air and was never sanded or finished and you had no idea you were supposed to put a little rubber band on it for a bridle and you killed yourself for the first month till somebody investigated for you finally and told you how crazy you were for not mentioning how hard it was to blow, and then you shoot back that you did, at every frigging practice, but nobody would pay any attention and just told you to suck it up, shut up and play...

But I digress.

You can buy the Lark model, I've done it, they do play, and you can learn the fingering and a lot of the hand techniques and chanter responses. But you learn to blow instead of bag and bellows it, which is about half the equation. And like I say, I do play both UP and Highland pipes, so I'm used to blowing hard and blowing a lot (as has been pointed out) and it just isn't worth the effort to make any serious attempt to develop this approach into a portable, "sit in" type of instrument.

I made my own reed for this thing, and sanded it down so it was as easy as I could get it and keep it reliable with the water it has to shake off, and even though it was easier than the stock reeds Lark sent out, it's not comfortable to maintain for very long. I suppose I could sand it some more, but then you run into performance problems, which again, further removes it from being a useful replication of UP characteristics for practice of any other purpose.

I also sawed into the cap and plumbed together some elbows and bent the stiff, skywardly shooting hose it came with, that kept trying to flip the mouthpiece out of my mouth, into a horizontal direction and extended the blowhose a bit, otherwise, for those reasons it also wasn't very comfortable to play.

Come to think of it, I've by now stuck a plastic chanter made by Bob May into the cap since the original chanter is snapped at the skinny little neck. I see it thrown in the corner there...

Some kid sat on mine in any case, as I was keeping it in the car and had tossed it on the back seat after playing it at lunch or something.

I think the topic was answering the question of whether or not there is some good reason for not playing an UP chanter without a bag and bellows. I think my answer is yes.

Royce