I am starting to incorporate the drones into my playing. My bass drone plays in tune but its the same octave as the baritone drone. It should be an octave lower right?
Its a regular cane reed with a thread bridle and a bit of wax on the tongue.
So… what do I do to drive the drone down an octave. I have noticed that if I put the tiniest bag pressure on (not near enough to play the chanter) the drone will growl down in the right octave. But I can’t play like that.
One thing to try is to get a finger nail under the tongue of the drone, pry it out 1 cm or so and let it snap back into place. Try that a few times and see if it has any effect on the stability of the drone.
If not, then try adding a little blu tac (poster putty) to the tongue of the drone. It only takes a “pin-head” size piece of blu tac to get the desired result. Make sure that when you are fitting the drone back into the mainstock, the tongue of the reed is in the “6 O’Clock” position (i.e. on the bottom).
You might have to adjust the bridle slightly, but if you do, then go 1mm at a time, and then check the drone is see if the sound has improved.
[quote=“PJ”]
Make sure that when you are fitting the drone back into the mainstock, the tongue of the reed is in the “6 O’Clock” position (i.e. on the bottom).
Unless you have a hollow mainstock, in which case the reed tongue will want to be in anything but the 6 O’clock position… the reason being that the tongue when vibrating will swing out quite a long way from the body of the reed and can hit the wall of the stock during its travels which would affect its operational stability. With a Hollow Stock it is possible to use far greater sized weights on the drone reed tongues as there is no possibility of them coming into contact with an unmoveable object (if the tongues are set to face towards the centre of the cavity)…in fact I use much heavier substances than ‘poster putty’ for my weights… even Lead , for my ‘overblown drone reeds’ !
I can see the point of a 6 O’Clock position for a solid mainstock as this will allow gravity to act as part of the ‘weight’ on the end of the tongue making it possible to use less of a lump of whatever for your weight and thus decreasing the likelihood of that lump coming into contact with the side of the hole in the stock.
Bob, it sounds like your drone reed needs some TLC alright, perhaps it has become misaligned or the bridle has slipped… difficult to tell exactly by your description. Good luck.
Similar to some earlier posts - “Did it ever work correctly?”
From the post, I’d guess “No”, in which case Mr. Wooffs historical advice to scrape at the root till the thing overblows, is still pretty sage…
Combine that with some weighting of the free end.
Making that scrape takes some experience, practice, etc, but that “deeeeeh…DAH” change in pitch and stability
you get when overblown is the aim. Think someone else pointed out to listen to Ennis’s “The wandering minstrel” LP
to hear this in action at the start of (at least one) tune(s).
If not comfortable scraping, well, that’s where the good luck comes in - or - the need to get a reedmaker involved directly.
M