hi all-anyone got any ideas please? my homemade square chanter ended up about 20 cents flat on the bottom d-everything else seems ok tho (within the limits of my homemade reed which puts the 2nd octave a bit flat-i guess the staple’s too small)-i’ve opened the bell out as much as i can, so do i now shorten the bell slightly? or will this kill it? many thanks,
Bill
is your hard D in tune? he speaks of taking out wood in the end area to bring the D up to pitch if i remember correctly.i think the real factor in this chanter is your reed making abilities and understandings.if you coudn’t reed a known good chanter,how could you reed an unknown? i wouldn’t chop it.you know that most chanters are flat on low D and the hard D is in tune. larger bore(more wood removed}='s sharper pitch.it would be easy to go too far enlarging that area. just my novice thoughts. i hope i am not telling you what you already know!
best of luck,tansy
Yeah, I used to have a crusty old chanter that just wouldn’t play in concert pitch no matter what I did with the reed, it just insisted on playing really flat! So I hack sawed off the end of the chanter and re drilled the holes… plays great now and in tune too! 
It had an ugly little shamrock design on it too so I filed that off and it looks much better now. I am going to chop off all eleven key block now too to pin mount the keys in their correct position. It looks like it was made with very light coloured wood, it wasn’t even black! So I painted it with black Hammerite paint to help resist against humidity.
Patrick.
[ This Message was edited by: Patrick D’Arcy on 2003-02-19 15:19 ]
…
Patrick, Patrick, Patrick… for shame! I’m gonna have to have Tommy Clean smack you next time he sees you!
He he he…
PD.
Try the wider staple, or just try shoving the reed in a bit farther to see if the flattish upper octave is fixed.
But if you get several reeds working well except for the low D being flat, grind it off or run it through a bandsaw or something, but only take an 1/16th inch or 1mm at a time or less.
The thing about making a chanter is it isn’t made until it works. If it works after you cut it off a bit, then it’s made. Then you can question whether one reed or another plays in it correctly or not.
If you overdo it, and it’s probably better if you do and the chanter is sharpish on low D, then you rush the bottom of the bell. From what it sounds like, you may have to shove that reed in and rush the lower bell with some strimmer/weedwhip line up to nearly the A to get the octaves in tune, unless the wider staple fixes both that and the flat low D.
Most of the chanters coming out of the Quinn/David Daye/normal modern setup school of thought require some rushing of the lower bore to both bring out a tuned hard/low D, and put the octaves in tune.