It’s often said that you can tell the wood an instrument is made from by the sound alone. Different types of wood tend to have specific tonal qualities attributed to them i.e Boxwood might be said to have a warm mellow tone, where as African Blackwood perhaps has a clean crisp sound.
I thought it might be interesting to run a ‘blind test’ to see if the above proves correct and you can tell the timber from the timbre - as it where!
The blacked out video is of a work-in-progress chanter I had almost finished making. Recorded in the workshop just after scalloping the tone holes, fitting the four stainless steel keys and just prior to final tuning and undercutting.
Thanks Sean, good to hear your playing the pipes again. It’s a slow air called ‘Gaoth Barra na dTonn’ taken from Emer Mayock’s 1996 debut album ‘Merry Bits of Timber’. There’s a short sample on her website:
I originally thought it was boxwood… But I have changed my mind. I now think its made from a fruit wood…apple or pear or maybe even plum… But Certainly not Melon Wood!
Inspired largely by my restoration of Felix Doran’s ‘Silver Set’ back in 2010 I thought I’d make an updated version of the metal chanter. The idea being to try and make a chanter that not only sounded and played like a normal one but also, within the constraints of the materials used, looked like a normal chanter.
It consists of a double skin - the outside is stainless steel and the inner tapered bore is hand rolled from brass sheet. The mounts are turned from stainless bar.
More photo’s of this chanter and also some, post restoration, photo’s of the Doran set (but not soundfiles unfortunately) can be seen on my public Facebook page:
Gorgeous work there! What an amazing chanter. It’ll never shrink, warp, or crack.
It will change dimension quickly as it gets cold and warm, though, like a silver flute or brass trumpet does. It’s an advantage to wood, in that it changes much more slowly.
Anyhow for a legitimate test as to chanter materials one would have to have several chanters made of different materials but all made to precisely the same specs, which is probably impossible to do. (No two chanters by the same maker, of the same material, ever seem to sound or play quite the same.)
Then each chanter would have to be recorded using the same reed, taking care that the pitch was precisely the same on each recording. Only then could one make judgments about the effect of the materials.
The idea behind the thread was really just to show that a chanter made from metal can sound very similar to one made using wood, thought this would be an entertaining way to demonstrate the idea.
‘Entertaining’ is an understatement. Although I’m not the least surprised by the resulting quality of the sound, and even though metal chanters are not a new thing (cf your Doran chanter) it is still amazing. How labour-intensive was it compared with building a wooden chanter?
Hi David, it was a labour-intensive process to say the least! Even allowing for the time spent working the design out, the actual manufacture did take at least twice as long as it would have for a similar chanter made using conventional methods.
Your right metal chanters are not a new idea; however the designs I’ve seen previously have either been made using the same method as the Felix Doran chanter I.e a rolled tapered tube with tubes radiating outwards for the fingers and keys (like most metal clarinets) or they have been made from a solid metal and drilled and reemed as per a normal chanter.
The design above differs in that the internal core is a tapered tube inside an outer sleeve. The bore and external diameter being exactly the same as its wooden counter part. As most of the area between bore and sleeve is hollow the weight is significantly less than it would be for a solid metal chanter.
David Daye has been making chanters out of brass tubing and PVC pipe for years and they sound just fine.
I think it’s more about the specs and the reed than the material, though material does play a role, which I proved to my own satisfaction when I played a dozen or so flute headjoints by the same maker, made out of four or five different woods. I could have easily sorted the headjoints by wood blindfolded, by how they played.
I have never coveted any metal woodwind instrument before, but this is brilliant, beautiful work. Not to be grandiose, but I love the ways innovation seems to be baked in to the traditions of union/uilleann pipemaking in specific, and ITM performance in general.
Had I known these traditions were so vibrant and dynamic (now there’s a happy paradox), I would have fallen down the ITM rabbit-hole much, much sooner, and been better off for it!
Good questions, I guess there is a risk of a galvanic corrosive reaction considering the bimetal construction. The use of 304L stainless steel with silver soldered joints and an absence of any water to act as an electrolyte should help to mitigate the problem. I’ve been using brass and stainless in conjunction for a while now with no apparent problems, aside from the expected oxidisation of the brass. Since there is a captive air space between the inner core and the outer sleeve perhaps some form of condensation could occur, have to wait and see. The chanter is just a prototype and I’ve no plans to replicate the design - in this exact form anyway.
