Norden Sackpipa Association of the Americas (NSAA)

[Baglady]

I played for a Jultide party on Sunday. Played the Longdans fra Solleron with stav players and the dancers singing. Way cool. A dancer came to me and said "I've been dancing that dance for over 30 years and that was...wow...something." I love playing for dancers.
_________________
A bagpipe is only too loud when it's out of tune

[jerry revelle]

This is an excellent way to spread the word about the säckpipa.

[Anders Jackson]

[texasbagpiper]

[texasbagpiper]

[Baglady]

Pardon my Americanizations.


Anders: How did you keep together? Were you spread out very much? Come to think of it, this is kind of what happened with us.
_________________
A bagpipe is only too loud when it's out of tune

[Black Rose]

By the way, the reason a huge hall full of dancers could hear the tune was due to the Mighty Hamon traffic cone orange-colored all-synthetic pipes. A lot of discussion has been had here about changing the tone with synthetic reeds or the synthetic bores of the the pipes themselves, but most of the fine objections I've heard to some change in tonal character are laid to rest when you actually have to be heard in public, on time, in tune, and staying in tune.

There's a lot to be said for that. A lot.

I changed the drone reed to a Hamon synthetic reed immediately upon purchase of my Faust pipes because for one thing, the reed/narrow bore in the long drone was just too quiet to be heard at all even against the rather quiet chanter. The chanter I set up with a Hamon chanter reed made specifically for it, then stowed it as a plug-in backup against future catastrophe. I also saved the Faust chanter reed, with the drone, as a reference and backup. Then I made a new chanter reed out of a slightly narrower tube of Florida Arundo Donax I got from an uilleann piping friend and made an up-cut reed that is absolutely brilliant. It required no scraping so it's bark is intact, which adds a brighter tone and stability--compared to the, fatter, scraped reed that came with the pipes. It was good too, but not this good.

The cane chanter reed I made is warmer and sweeter than the synthetic one, but it does have the typical drawback of needing to be played for a few minutes before the upper and lowerhands settle into true intonation and the pitch drops to concert standard. Mostly this is manifest by the low E (A/E chanter) being sharp a while along with the couple of attendant notes above it being a bit sharp.

For whatever reason, the reed I made has a heavy resistance to being blown shut-not quite as bullet-proof as the Hamon, but well ahead of the Faust version that came with the pipes. Anyway, I made a great reed the first time out in about five minutes and plan to play it for a decade or two. I don't have the energy to make spare reeds just for the fun of it any more, and I did the same thing on uilleann pipes and have ended up playing my first-made reed for seven or eight years now--with a box of spares just sitting there waiting for me to jamb the reed into the stock sideways or miss the hole or something.

The stability of the synthetic drone allows you to make assessments about the chanter that would only be confusing with both the chanter and drone moving about for half an hour--assuming you let the pipes dry out between playings as you should to prevent both bag and reed from rotting out and growing mold and mildew.

Still, I'm torn between the arrogance of being able to boast about playing my own, hand-made reed, and just sticking the synthetic chanter reed in there and never having to worry about "warming up" again. Or more importantly in consort/band play, of being in my own world regarding base pitch and intonation.
_________________
Sigs are a waste of bandwidth