I’ve been bitten by the piping bug and have been saving for a practice set. There are a lot of questions i want to ask really, but here’s just one of them that you’ve probably heard dozens of times before…
I’ve heard differing opinions on the necessity of chanter keys. Some say that a beginner should get a fully keyed chanter to accustom themselves with it, even if they won’t be using the keys at first; others have told me to atleast get a chanter with key blocks so that they can be added later if desired; and a lot of people have said they’re not at all necessary.
What are your opinions on the matter? Do keys and keyblocks just get in the way, or are they really necessary? From a beginner’s perspective it seems that they are just a complication.
There are many schools of thought about this topic. I’d suggest running a search on it here; I know its been brought up before.
I personally would not be without a C nat key, and I also really like an F nat key. Keyblocks are great to have; I have never founf them to be in the way, and if you schould choose to get keys added in the future, you’re ready to go.
Yeah, i imagine it will have been, and i tried doing a search but for some reason there seem to be quite a few topics with the words “chanter” and “keys”! I’d be obliged if someone could direct me to the thread.
I’ve heard that adding keys can cause tuning problems. One thing that’s suggested by certain people is that you get all the keys when you get your new chanter. I’ve a chanter that keys were added to and it didn’t change anything (at least as far as my ear can tell).
Talk to your pipemaker about what his/her recommendations are.
You can have the holes for the keys made and then plugged, so that keys can be easily added later. This allows the maker to tune and voice the chanter taking those extra chimneys into account. Several makers do this as a standard rule…I can’t remember who else I know that does it, but I know Brad Angus is one of them.
I don’t know, those pipemaker guys know more about it than I! My guess though would be that the chimney of the hole is not completely filled by the plug, maybe just the top part. That would make sense, since if the key is there the chimney is open up to the keypad.
TommyK has a point - and indeed, if plugs are used they should probably be very short. I’ve used this approach before, with plugs shallow enough that when the key seats are later formed, the plugs would entirely be removed - in other words, so that the chimneys of the plugged chanter are identical to the chimneys of the keyed chanter.
Another way of dealing with this issue is to “cap” the keys instead, either with shallow wooden caps (again, over the flat key seats), or by cementing pads over the key seats.with a glue that is removed at a later date if and when the keys are added.
[/quote]Another way of dealing with this issue is to “cap” the keys instead, either with shallow wooden caps (again, over the flat key seats), or by cementing pads over the key seats.with a glue that is removed at a later date if and when the keys are added.
This I how I would address the issue. A thin veneer of matching wood should be glued over the toneholes using hide glue or shellac - easily removed, thus preserving the original chimney heights.
Aside from that, there is the original question of which keys to have. My own personal view is that a chanter should be fitted with the full complement of at least 13 keys from the outset.
These are:
C natural)
F natural)
B flat )
G Sharp )
all used in normal playing;
These keys should then be augmented with the following:
High D
High E
High F#
True E flat ( NOT a Ghost D)
Air Brake/Emergency Stop (Sometimes known as a Stop Key)
Another Air Brake/Emergency Stop Key, but fitted on the wrong side of the Chanter to please idiots
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I would place order of importance with keys this way:
C natural: essential for playing the high C on the chanter. Not many tunes go that high, but enough of them do that it’s good to have. For many people, having this key is all that they need.
F natural: Again, good for a few tunes. Half-holing the F can work and sometimes–especially in slow tunes–the effect of half-holing is preferable, but if you want to get F natural “on the nose”, it’s very helpful to have a key.
G sharp: good if you plan on doing a lot of playing with fiddle players, as A major is a common key for fiddle tunes. It’s actually a fun key to play in once you get used to it.
B flat: I can think of about a half dozen tunes that use Bb. I almost never use my Bb key…Then again, if you’re going to go ahead and get the other three and you have the dosh for one more, why not?
Hope that helps. Is Colin Jerry still making pipes on the Isle of Man? On a trip to Ireland nearly ten years ago, I went on harrowing car ride over Connor Pass in Kerry with a mad Manxman who said he was learning uilleann pipes at the time. I think I remember him saying that Colin made the bags out of some kind of Kevlar-based material used for life vests or something…
my first chanter I ordered with the C nat. but never used it, so I never ordered a key again and I sold the one that had it. I mainly use F nat. off the knee with a little half holing. If I were wealthy I might order them but I really never once had the feeling I needed them. There are other $500. items I could use more.
Goll as gaggan, ghooinney, goll as gaggan. As oo hene?
I didn’t know that Mr Jerry made pipes, i’ll have to ask him about them.
It seems that, on the question of chanter keys, there is no definitive answer, and it’s all down to preference. I’ll probably start off with a keyless chanter to learn the fingerings. I also forsee them getting in the way. If i ever feel the need for them i could get them added later.
Exactly the same here. You can learn all NPU videos and Sean Potts tutorials without the need of a single key.
On a keyed D chanter noone would play Drowsy Maggie in D minor and relearn all the fingering just because the keys would make it possible. When I want to play it in D minor I’ll use a C chanter.
Am I missing something?
Hmm, well there are tunes (admittedly a minority) that can’t be reached with a single diatonic scale (or even diatonic+1) no matter what key - and it can be refreshing to play in D minor against drones rather than Eminor, sometimes. And the top hand in the second octave can benefit a lot from Cnat and C# keys.
Reading the responses so far, interestingly we seem, at least on this particular thread, to have an emerging consensus about the priority of keys.
But true enough, my personal chanter doesn’t have any keys on it at the moment (holes are bored and blu-tacked). I plan to add most of them, especially the high C# and Fnatural - probably Cnat after that - but I attribute this to personal quirks, and the fact that my chanter’s high C# is much better in tune with the key than without. Similarly I put down to personal preference the fact that I would put G# near the bottom of my list (I have no affection for A major)
I must admit to having key-lust. I would LOVE to be able to afford a chanter with a cnat, f, and bflat and hopefully someday the winds of fortune will change. I am fascinated with playing the really old tunes like Geoghagan and the earliest O’Farrell, along with Jacksons gems, and manyu of these tunes are in keys like Bflat Eflat and G min. I am still very much a beginner, but if I am plodding through a dance tune that has the occasional f nat or even a bflat, I can usually get by with a half hole. But those old ones will often START on bflat or eflat etc, and you just can’t half-holie your way out of that one… at least I can’t.
I’m not so sure about your conclusion (about the early tutors).
To take an example: in O’Farrell’s first “Collection of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes” [n.b. not the same as his Pocket Companion…], I only see four tunes out of 69 with a flat in the key signature. (O’Farrell himself had no chanter keys, it seems - in his fingering charts he gives cross-fingerings for all the chromatic notes. The first union pipe tutor to mention keys was Colcloughc. 1806?. or 1840?.. but I digress…)
Of the four tunes in O’Farrell’s 1804 tutor containing Bflat, the first (Carolans Farewell to Music) would probably be manageable on a keyless modern chanter at the correct tempo; in the next (The Miller’s Maggot) the Bflat appears only once, in the next-to-last bar of the tune. The third and fourth examples - Jackson’s Lake and Shauneen o Shea - would indeed be tough going. However this raises another possibility - it has been asserted by folks more familiar with the old manuscripts than myself that these transcriptions were often “lifted” from old Flute tutors and the like (or possibly from a Pastoral tutor - see below). This presents the somewhat unsavory, but in my opinion not unlikely, prospect that the tunes were not played as written by O’Farrell or his piping contemporaries, but were in fact played in more felicitous keys. The apparent fact that O’Farrell himself had no keys makes the prospect of his playing in flat key signatures seem somewhat less likely, or at least worthy of remark.
None of the above examples start on Bflat and there are no instances of Eflat at all…
In Geoheganthere are indeed a handful of tunes with one or two flats, some of which start on Bflat, but it may not be reasonable to assume these were playable on the Union pipes[*]. Geoghegan was after all written for a keyless Pastoral chanter for which cross-fingered chromatics were given - the fingerings are significantly different from those given by O’Farrell or later Union Pipe tutors. For instance, in the Geoghegan fingering chart, Fnatural and Fsharp are not appreciably different in “awkwardness” from one another, and Bflat is as straightforward as B natural (both being ‘forked’ fingerings requiring three fingers on the chanter). The comments about pieces being “lifted” from tutors for other instruments apply all the more to Geoghegan I believe. But if the tunes were indeed played as written in Geoghegan, they were played without keys on a small-tonehole Pastoral chanter which, presumably, was tuned to accommodate chromatic notes such as the cross-fingered Bflat and F natural.
If it’s authenticity you’re after, for Geoghegan you’d need a Pastoral chanter that played a reasonable cross-fingered scale; otherwise, it would make more sense IMO to transpose the tunes in flat key signatures.
best regards,
Bill
[*] - There are acoustical reasons why I would expect it to be more difficult to produce a decent cross-fingered chromatic scale on the chanter once the Pastoral’s foot joint was removed and the instrument stopped on the knee… so perhaps this drove the development of chanter keys after the emergence of the Union pipes.
p.s. - Many thanks to Ross Anderson for hosting the PDFs of Colclough and Geoghegan - his site also has the O’Farrell “Pocket Companions” but not, it seems, the earlier O’Farrell tutor, the O’Farrell’s Collection…for the Union Pipes . The latter is available online somewhere as a pdf but I can’t recall where… it’s also available from Pat Sky in facsimile/printed form.
My guess though would be that the chimney of the hole is not completely filled by the plug, maybe just the top part. That would make sense, since if the key is there the chimney is open up to the keypad.