Any ideas on what this is? Chinese bagpipes without the bag, maybe? Looks rather like a cluster of drone pipes – couldn’t see any tone holes. If you do know what it is, how the heck is it played?
(Caution: the seller is in China and, according to buyer reviews, is not necessarily honest about the age of their wares!)
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=624&item=3735040395&rd=1
– Daryl
That’s a sheng. The toneholes can be seen at the bases of the pipes.
Wow. A sheng. Just what kind of tobaccy does a sheng take anyway?
In case anyone’s interested, here’s a useful quote from the seller:
The item was work well and keeps full!and it comes from people collect.
So, not to worry. It keeps full. And comes from people collect. (Does that mean the buyer has to pay shipping?)
Yes, that was a helpful line, wasn’t it? Talk about multiple entendre! 
Anyway, thanks Nano & Em! That was far too quick, though. I’d hoped it wouldn’t be THAT easy. Now I feel truly dumb.
A friend told me that there’s someone in San Diego who plays these beautifully. By covering the sound holes on various pipes you can play chords as well as notes. But he also said that the seams are typically sealed with lead, so you have to be careful about that. (He also noticed that the seal around the base of the mouthpiece looks quite shiny, and that they probably bang these out as tourist trinkets but try to make them look antique.)
Still, might be fun on the novelty instrument shelf.
Wow. A sheng. Just what kind of tobaccy does a sheng take anyway?
Wow. Uh. I don’t think it’s tobbacco they put in those things.
Rumor has it that there was someone at Willie Week a few years back, playing ITM on one of these. I think I may have read about it in the Crossroads book (and wouldn’t that be appropriate, too).
I seem to recall that, too. I believe it’s somewhere in the “Instruments that Irk You” thread over at the ITM Forum. The poster wasn’t irked, mind you, with the end result.
Please don’t. Useless minutiae are my stock in trade.
I have smaller one of these that I picked up in China a few years back. The make a lot of these to sell to tourists - the small models only cost a few dollars (mine’s quite playable - I suspect many aren’t). They’re a free reed instrument, rather like a harmonica.
If you really want one, Lark in the Morning carries a few models. Or you can probably pick up a small one like mine in any area with a decent-sized Chinatown.
This, and related forms from other far eastern countries are the oldest known of the free reeds. I have a kaen, from Thailand, which is similar.
in times gone by, the best of these instruments were made of bamboo that came from 100 year old kitchen roof thatch, the airborne oils doing the seasoning. and people on the uilleann forum bitch about having to wait.
If that’s really an antique, that industrial-grade plastic strapping around it is an interesting approach to restoration.
I think the thing that appeared at Willie Week might have been a kaen of the Thai variety. In Japan, this type of free-reed instrument is known as the sho (basically just the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese character sheng) and is used in gagaku (traditional Japanese court music…a bit of an acquired taste). Another instrument I’ve always been curious about in this vein is the hichiriki, a double-reeded Japanese shawm. Sounds a bit like an uilleann pipe chanter, actually. When I was living in Japan, a noted hichiriki player named Togi Hideki did an album of new agey, Kenny G-esque crap and made a serious killing. He drives a Ferrari now…
The Lark site has another interesting instrument, the Gu Zheng. I’d wonder what they sound like.
The mechanism (or lack of it) of operation is a masterpiece of simplicity; each pipe has a Free Reed at its base through which the air flows into the pipe. The pipe has a small hole above the reed and when a finger covers it the reed is coupled to the pipe whose length is chosen to resonate at the reeds pitch, and start to vibrate.
Positive action with no mechanism to go wrong.
The notes start very quickly with no perceivable delay.
John S
Oh, but that’s antique plastic strapping, straight from the Ming dynasty :roll:
If anybody is considering this, you might want to look at the shipping charge - $73 
I’ve bought stuff and had it shipped from China and the shipping isn’t that expensive, usually around ten to fifteen dollars for priority mail that took about a week.