When to use a wire rush?

[Donald E Baltus]

[quote="Peter Laban"]A student of mine has a new half set that came with a rushed, or more correctly: wired, chanter.

Some maintain Leo Rowsome chanters were designed to be rushed down. I don't know, they certain seem to want to. Call me old fashioned but I would not at all at all like paying a big load of money only to get a chanter with a guitar string superglued to it's insides.

[quote="ceadach"]

So who claimed anything was superglued into the bore? Are you suggesting that's how you personally attach a rush or what? Why on earth would you need to superglue anything used as a rush? It's not glued in just pull it out if it bothers you folks.

I'm not addressing this to anyone in the thread specifically, but I also think the reed question is being oddly ignored particularly in regard to a new chanter and reed coming from a maker. A perfect reed that plays a given chanter a hair sharp or has the octaves a bit off can be rushed down instantly to perfect tune--or you could do a Paddy Keenan and spend a couple of hours a day whittling reeds and filling boxes with them looking for that magic one that does everything perfectly. Most makers have to maintain a cost-effective operation so that approach is out of the question. Once it's in your lap at home, knock 'yerself out. Start making or buying reeds or just take the little bitty thin wire out and play it without. Odds are, the people complaining most about player-based tuning and offering examples of great sounding pipes or regulators playing without rushes "perfectly" couldn't even tell that Jimi Hendrix was out of tune most of the time. For the most part however, Jimi just kept playing the gig nonstop in an heroine-fueled stupor for an hour or two while bending his upside-down-and-backwards Stratocaster into decent pitch on the long notes. It just got a to be a little more work the longer the strings stretched into the night.

Theoretically, gee, the one or even two regulator setup could be made to work without rushing systems. But the reason rushing systems were added is because it's just so much easier to keep three regulated chanters in good tune on all notes while the fourth melody chanter is being squeezed up and down at radically differing pressures, if you have built-in adjustment on both individual notes as well as overall pitch via a clever little stick inside.

It's called science. If it frightens you, go back to the era when all the Highland pipers, even some great solo players, were telling us how sacred even the most crap chanter chattered off with just a rough gouge and a sharpened butter knife was--and that the presence of tape or the carving open of a hole or two would destroy it. Or, have a read of the late-great Roger Gould-King of South Africa who published asinine diagrams of Highland chanter reeds claiming to show how to sharpen or flatten each individual note by shaving its specific zone on the reed blade, and thus all tuning could be done by reed adjustment.

But then, after a decade or two of that BS somebody began to notice that all the World's Champions were playing Sacred Sinclairs with the holes carved open so wide they were oval to the point of touching one-another, and even the Shepherd custom made specials winning the contests were being filed open and taped just as badly in spite of the Master Mangler of Fife being on hand at nearly every practice.

And here's another little secret for the Mysterions out there--all the orchestral reeds with their tens of thousands of dollars per unit of full-state-of-the-art engineering and hundreds or years of applied acoustic physics are notoriously bitched at by most of the ensemble as being out of tune and poorly intoned as a regular feature of their performance. Oh, yes, and the worst of these would be either the oboe or English horn, closest to the old UP chanter but the way they fix all the crap is to lip in each individual note--something hard for us to do without being able to physically touch the reed while playing.

At any rate, take the pathetically inconsequential little adjustment offered by the thin wire rush out of the bore, toss it in the bin, run away from the wax and tape, and it's probably not going to be apparent to you at all anyway if the concept of making those sorts of subtle adjustments is so bizzare to you in the first place.

If you smoke enough weed you'll sound great. Ask Jimi.

[billh]

.. or the carving open of a hole or two would destroy it. ...

Well, yes, actually that would destroy it. But yeah, it might help win you a competition :-/

One thing I never said is "don't tune your chanter". If a rush is what it takes, go for it, if it doesn't work or your next reed happens to have more magic pixie dust on it, you can always take it out. Or you can move the tape. The best pipers seem to do a fair bit of tonehole shading and such to get their tuning just-so, so you don't always notice if the instrument, naively played, is "out of tune",

The rush in Froment's chanters is pretty big, especially towards the top end, in proportion to the bore. As I said before, I can see how one might arrive at that choice, but I prefer not to build such a thing into the design; I try to use other means to bring Leo R's intrinsically sharp-tending design down a bit.

As for orchestral oboes being out of tune, well that's a function of lots of things, mostly a wet-blown reed and three octaves. Believe it or not we have it better in several ways, i.e. nobody reallly expects the third octave to be in tune, and we aren't saturating our reeds in saliva as we play, so barring flood conditions the variations in cane moisture content are a lot smaller during any one sitting.

If you smoke enough weed you'll sound great. Ask Jimi.

Whatever you're smoking, it sure ain't weed. Mind you, you have been making more sense than usual lately...

Bill

[Cayden]

So who claimed anything was superglued into the bore? Are you suggesting that's how you personally attach a rush or what? Why on earth would you need to superglue anything used as a rush? It's not glued in just pull it out if it bothers you folks.

I said that based on the fact I have seen several chanters from one reputable maker that had a guitar string supaglued to their insides as a standard feature. Why would anyone want to do that? Exactly my point, to compensate for something amiss in their bore design .