Bottom D

Uilleann Pipes
1

I’ve a funny reed in my C chanter. To get it playing in tune with itself, with a nice tone, the lips of the reed are fairly closed, but this gives makes “soft” bottom D difficult to sustain (it jumps up to something like Bb) and the hard D is no longer attainable. If I open the lips a little, the hard and soft Ds are both easy to play and maintain but the tuning goes all over the place.

Any suggestions for strengthening the hard or soft bottom D ?

Apart from the bottom D issue, it’s a nice reed (pressure, tone, etc.) so I’m anxious to keep and I don’t want to do too much R&D on it.

2

Looks like you might have to trim the lips a bit to strengthen the bottom D, but then if that makes the rest of the reed too strong higher up, then might have to balance it with some strategic sanding in other areas such as the sides.

Then again, it could actually be that it’s not the lips but that the scrape for the bottom D is still a little under-done and might need loosening up a bit.