A Case For Reeds, or The Pastoral Progress

[WireHarp]

Greetings all.
Well what a journey to get a set of pastoral pipes working... they look so innocent.. so enticing, like a sultry sigh-reen. Thanks to this forum, I was able to locate tools, get a hold of the NPU DVD on reedmaking, secure cane... all to find out it was all wrong. Turns out I needed to be making modified baroque oboe reeds. Oh yeah.. UP are obscure.. Well I fiddled and tweaked, ruined the first dozen with aplomb but finally... FINALLY have a reed that is playable in two octaves. Now tuning is another issue, but small steps..patience Grasshopper. Even managed to spit out a regulator reed that sounds every note! The drones are all working.. good LORD the thing is playing. I still do not think I have the reedmaking dead on yet, because some notes are ok na dothers are horrifically out of tune, but progress is made. I have about three reeds on hand now of varying quality and an extra regulator reed. I have seen folks keeping a line of reeds on a board with nails, but I was wondering what do most players use to carry around extra reeds? I love the look of fancy schmantz oboe/bassoon type cases but they seem to be way too small for UP (or in this case pastoral) reeds. Any collective wisdom out there? Thanks..

(P.S. absolutely remarkable how many tunes in the old pastoral manuscripts called for high c's and d's. No WAY I can squeak those out yet)

Robert Mouland
www.wireharp.com

[Uilliam]

Walnut 36-Note Swiss Music Box
Only $750.00

At least ye will get a tune out of it....which is more than ye appear to be getting out of the "pastorals"....
What happened to the reeds ye were getting frae Chris?
Slán Go Foill
Uilliam

[teirw]

Congratulations. I used to use leather cigar cases ( cheap in Spain on cane foraging trips ) but now I use the cases supplied by Brian Howard. They are available mail order from www.howardmusic.co.uk either singley or in blocks of four.

[WireHarp]

Ooooooo I like it! I could screw it to the outside of my fancy case like a glove box; listen to "Edelweiss" while picking out the nicest reed

I haven't seen any reeds from across the pond Uilliam but I gather that pipe makers tend to focus more on backorders of pipes than oddball reeds. Someone posted on the forum a while back, that we cannot really rely on anybody to 'fix' things for us; we are alone in this and have to muddle through as best as we are able. I think that is the truth. I am happier if I can discover the right road to take in reedmaking, because then the knowledge is firmly mine and I know that I will have a reliable source in the future.. eventually. But there is the trick eh.. 'eventually'.

Leather cigar case.. hmmm... I make leather instrument cases as well. Sounds like a plan. Thanks to both!

RWM

[fancypiper]

I use a small fishing lure plastic box to keep my "necessary stuff" in, like reeds, corks, poster putty, piper's wax, beeswax, thread, dental floss PTFE, C and D tuning forks, and a broken reed head for sticking stuff into holes/removing stuff from holes.

I think I picked it up in WalMart.

[The Sporting Pitchfork]

The pastoral pipes are indeed one of the historical "lost causes" of European piping traditions. Buoyed by his initial successes with smallpipes with the help of Colin Ross, Hamish Moore was for a time apparently very taken with trying to revive pastoral pipes (his business logo that can be seen on his business cards and his website is of an old engraving of a Scottish piper playing pastoral pipes) as their fingering made them more immediately accessible to Highland pipers than uilleann pipes. Hamish made a few sets of pastoral pipes in the mid-eighties and can be heard playing some gorgeous tunes on them on his first two albums, "Cauld Wind Pipes" and "Open Ended"--with birls and all! The pipes on these recordings sounded wonderful--very much like uilleann pipes, but with a slightly stronger nasality that sounds more akin to Border pipes (but presumably without as much volume).Ultimately, he found that he couldn't find a stable enough design and gave up on them...

Still, they were played from the mid-18th century at least up until the mid-19th, and they were favored by several players in Ireland and the Scottish Borders (several members of the famous Allan family played them) so some people must have known the secrets of how to get the reeds to work pretty well...Too bad that all of the people who were best in the know aren't around anymore.