Hi all,
My baritone regulator reed has seemed more wonky than usual lately. When I tune it so that the A is in tune with the chanter, the D is wildly sharp (say, somewhere in the neighborhood of F natural). by the time I manage to get enough blu-tack on it to get it in tune, the F# is fine, but the G is a hair flat, and the A is significantly flat. Any ideas about a means of getting the D down in pitch a bit without throwing off the higher notes?
I’ve never tried it,but is it possible to put tape on the hole to bring it down ?
RORY
Tape will in most cases hinder the key pad from sealing properly. Wax is also not recommendable.
A small crescent-shaped piece of cork will do the same job and can be inserted deep enough into the tone hole so it won’t interfere with the key pad.
BTW, have you checked if all the keys are sealing properly? A flat A note can be a giveaway for leakage in some other place.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Michael. In the end, it turned out that the bridle on the reed was the culprit–silly me for not noticing it sooner… Everything’s back to normal now. For the time being…
Welcome to the wonderful world of regulator tuning - many times I’ve spent hours on a particular note which just wouldn’t go in tune before I noticed the real problem was a leaky key (most usually a different one), and it literally took me years trying to get bari A in tune before I realised the actual problem was in the stock bore…
The cork trick is the only way I can get the Cs on tenor and bass in tune on my set, and I also use it for tuning G on the tenor without flattening F#, which seems to be a nightmare on almost every set.
Why does this have to be so hard? One would think that these things should really be fairly simple, relatively speaking, as each reg has so few notes to produce, and only in 1 octave. As if dealing with tuning chanters wasn’t time consuming enough…