Flat set in a traditional style

[Patrick D'Arcy]

Beautiful set Ross. Congratulations to both yourself and Joe!

Patrick.

[daveboling]

What's the key below the Fnat ring-key on the two chanters? Eb?

Yep. Or D#, take your pick

As Patrick would say, "Careful now!". In just intonation, an E-flat, and a D# are two different notes.

Well, I guess this takes care of my anal comments for the day

dave boling

[Ross]

The drones are just right, and there isn't a problem with intonation.
No doubt the stop key has something to do with this - though in the
Kenna set the air inlet to the main stock is tiny to prevent lock-in
with the drone reeds. Different ways of achieving the same effect, I
suppose.

I still haven't figured out what to use the D sharp key for. Best idea
so far is to alternate it with ghost D in Jenny's Welcome to Charlie.
Cleary people used to use accidentals more - look at all the slow airs
O'Neill has in G minor and D minor, or the old tutor books. I wonder
what caused that to go out of fashion? The growing use of regulators?

Ross

[billh]

The drones are just right, and there isn't a problem with intonation.
No doubt the stop key has something to do with this - though in the
Kenna set the air inlet to the main stock is tiny to prevent lock-in
with the drone reeds. Different ways of achieving the same effect, I
suppose.

I'm a little unsure of what you mean here Ross - do you mean to say that the opening in the mainstock leading into the bag is small, which reduces the coupling between the drones and the chanter? I am not sure the direct tie-in argument implies this would be a good idea or not; perhaps phase locking between the chanter reed and drones would be a good thing?

I still haven't figured out what to use the D sharp key for. Best idea
so far is to alternate it with ghost D in Jenny's Welcome to Charlie.
Cleary people used to use accidentals more - look at all the slow airs
O'Neill has in G minor and D minor, or the old tutor books. I wonder
what caused that to go out of fashion? The growing use of regulators?

Ross

Well, looking further back at the stuff that was in the 'tutors', there are other possibilities. Although it's right to be a bit sceptical of the tutors as a true reflection of what people were playing (they served as adverts after all - most authors of tutors were pipemakers ), the tutors include all sorts of music which today seems ill-suited to pipes; popular songs, show tunes, etc.

Also O'Neill was transcribing partly from fiddle players who weren't constrained by diatonic scales. To add to the confusion where collectors are concerned, a few may have transcribed tunes into the 'correct' key, e.g. they may have transcribed a tune which we would notionally think of as being in C, which was played on a 17.5" chanter, into 'B flat' since the bell note was at the C pitch of the day (nowadays we'd call it B). If they'd been transcribing from a player on a 15.5"chanter (which we'd today call C#), they might have transcribed the key as C instead.

(Confused yet?)

Perhaps the accidentals went out of fashion due to the gradual decay of keywork

Bill