Hi
Is it possible the chanter can change after keys are fitted to it ?
Patrick
Yes.
Why is this? because fo the spaces between the pads and the bore?
But the funny thing, If you go to your pipemaker for the keys. He just makes it. And the chanter can be different after the works. But when he makes a full keyed chanter, he has another way to make it, or does they just make it and thats it? I have put it on the forum , because a play a beautifull chanter, with only a F key. And really want (have) to play fully keyed
The new holes, even when closed, will affect the tuning. The maker should re-voice the chanter, i.e. adjust hole openings and under cutting; however it may be more difficult due to the adjustmetns already made without the holes (tougher to add wood that to take it away)
Brad Angus drills all holes regardless of how many keys are ordered and covers any unkeyed ones with a leather patch for this reason.
Talk to your maker - see how confortable they are about adding keys.
My C chanter has a 3rd octave D key which was added by someone other than the original maker. When I first had the chanter, the first octave Cnat and C# were flat. On advice from someone on this forum, I blocked the hole under the D key with some blutac. This greatly improved the C/C# tuning.
Yes: those spaces act, effectively, as perturbations of the bore. In other words, they make the effective bore a bit larger where the tonehole is drilled, even when the pad covers the hole.
“Fully keyed” is a somewhat strange concept, since different makers/designs can accommodate different numbers and arrangements of keys. I reckon you have specific keys in mind… ?
I expect the high d and e keys are the ones most likely to wreak havoc if added later. B flat or Cnat might be risky too, but perhaps you can get away with adding G#…
Bill
I expect the high d and e keys are the ones most likely to wreak havoc if added later. B flat or Cnat might be risky too, but perhaps you can get away with adding G#…
Bill
The keyes to be added are C nat and b flat.
Pitty my pipemaker is not along us anymore (Dave williams) So I will be very carefully to make a decision. [/quote]
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In that case I would advise against it.
I’ll second this.
Bill, if you were to get copies of Dave’s notes (boring patterns & specs) or possibly borrow a chanter he already keyed, would you then attempt such a modification?
That’s an interesting question. I suppose that if I had on hand a chanter that had almost exactly the same bore as the unkeyed chanter, but with Bflat and Cnat keys, I might consider adding the keys, if the data from the keyed chanter suggested that they could be added without significantly altering the existing toneholes. It does take one into the grey area surrounding “irreversible” changes to another makers’ work (even though the holes for keys could presumably be re-filled/blocked if desired, ‘reversing’ the operation). I’ve gone on record in opposition to modifying another makers’ work, so I would have to think long and hard about it even if Dave’s prior work and/or patterns suggested that the keys could be added successfully. I wouldn’t dream of adding keys to a Coyne, for instance - would it be wrong to afford Dave’s work such respect?
It’s worth bearing in mind, also, that altering such a chanter (even in accordance with Dave’s “patterns/specs”) would probably impact its value negatively, so it still probably makes more sense to leave it as the maker left it, and replace the chanter if the current owner really felt the need for additional keys.
regards
Bill
I’ll second that. Start looking at other chanters if you feel you want the extra keys, till then half hole the notes.
I would think it would depend on who,s doing the work !.A good pipemaker would under stand what effect the new holes will have and be able to counter-act any negative effect.
RORY
ROTFL
Things are not nearly that simple! I would be surprised to find a modern pipemaker who could explain the specific effect new holes have on their own chanters, let along someone else’s!
I am surprised you feel that way !!! I know when Steve Scales was having his chanter fitted with keys (from 1 to 5) Alain Froment explained to him exactly what would happen and how he keep everything all right .Steve reckons the chanter is now better than it was before !!
RORY
Bill , I,m very curious about your statement,are you saying that the pipemakers that you know or have talked to ,when they fit keys to their chanters that they don’t really know what they are doing
Maybe I ,ve got it wrong ,could you clarify your statement !
RORY
I reckon a good pipemaker will have learned from experience what to expect when adding keys to one of his own chanter designs (if in fact the maker attempts to add toneholes to an already-voiced chanter - some makers may decline to do so). In this respect a maker who pays close attention will indeed “know what he is doing”, and I assume Alain has a good knowledge, based in experience, of what happens when keys are added to his design. (I would still be surprised - though happily - if Alain could “explain” this satisfactorily from a theoretical/acoustical perspective… not that it matters!)
Generalizing from that experience to another maker’s chanter design is where I think one begins to operate in the dark. The acoustics of chanters is sufficiently interrelated/complex[*], and chanter designs sufficiently diverse, that it would not be wise to assume that what works for one “Rowesome” design (for instance) will work for another.
A sufficiently sophisticated computer program may be able to predict the effects to some extent (even though all the woodwind acoustical models I am aware of contain substantial simplifications/assumptions). But the only person I know of who has applied any kind of acoustical model capable of predicting the effect of bore perturbations is Craig Fischer, and even his model was limited to the first couple of harmonics (and did not account for turbulent flow or other nonlinear effects). Furthermore, this model only predicted the effect on tuning, and might not be a good predictor of the impact of perturbations on clarity of attack or stability of particular notes (e.g.one might fail to predict an effect on bottom D stability with such a model). And of course, to use such a computer model, one must provide detailed bore measurements as input, since the results are specific to a particular bore profile.
For these reasons I am sceptical of anyone who claims to “understand” (in a predictive sense) the effect of adding toneholes to a chanter design with which they do not have direct prior experience.
Bill
[*] p.s. - Actually, the equations are not terrible complex, but they are difficult to solve - basically they can be expressed as various integrals over the length of the bore, which mathematically supports the observed phenomenon that “everything affects everything else”. A new tonehole, acting as a localized expansion of the bore, alters the waveform of every harmonic of every note below it in the bore (and to a smaller extent even alters the waveforms of notes ‘above’ it, for single-tonehole notes like d, C#, A, and F#).
Thanks Bill
Do you think the master pipemakers of the past were any more aware of acoustical theory than modern makers ?
RORY
Well, two of the landmarks of musical acoustics, Herrmann Helmholtz’ On The Sensation of Tone, and Arthur Benade’s Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics, were published in 1863 and 1976, respectively - so the 18th and 19th century makers could hardly have possessed such theoretical knowledge. What theory they might have been aware of is unlikely to have been of great practical importance - possibly it could have assisted them in creating instruments in new pitches, but it is hard to say.
Then again, I don’t think many contemporary pipemakers have a strong theoretical bent either.
Current theory only gets you so far, anyway - it has explanatory power, but only weak predictive power, which is what you want from a practical viewpoint. A good theoretical grounding can, however, help prevent a pipemaker from “inventing” his own (erroneous!) theories of acoustics based on limited data - I’ve seen these sorts of theoretical “explanations” from pipemakers from time to time, and they are usually demonstrably wrong from a modern scientific perspective.
There’s a tendancy to think of engineering (or ‘technics’, of which instrument making could be considered a variety) as being closely related to, or even following from, science. But this has only been true in the past few decades, and even now is only true in a few areas of engineering (say, nuclear reactors, semiconductor physics, or nanotechnology). For most of history and in most fields, technology has owed almost nothing to its contemporary science. Take, for instance, metallurgy - almost every metal alloy and technique was known centuries or even millennia before science could explain the effects, and it’s only in very recent years that it has been possible to predict the effect of adding particular alloying materials to metal. Before that, the watchwords of engineering were “try it and see”.
The old master instrument makers certainly were excellent craftsmen and most likely had a very long tradition of technique and experience behind them - which was handed down in a traditional manner. One of the most interesting questions in the history of the Irish/Union pipes has to do with where the expertise required to make such a sophisticated bore as the Union/Pastoral chanter originated - i.e. what was the precedent? It has been suggested that the oboe-making tradition furnished the prior art (at that time - early 18th century - this would have been the “Baroque” oboe).
Instrument making tends to be a conservative craft - witness the violin, whose design reached such a sophisticated state by the late 1500’s/early 1600’s that those instruments are regarded as the ultimate even today; every now and then someone creates an “improved” violin using modern acoustical theory, but those new designs never seem to catch on.
I do think, however, that every master craftsman has some conceptual framework for his craft; in that respect every instrument maker is likely to have some “theory” of how the instrument works, even if that theory is not based on current science. Knowing a bit more about how the 19th century makers conceptualized their work would probably help us to understand them and their craft (and by extension, our favorite instrument), better.
Bill