My tenor drone is cutting out when I play high octave …solution???
Snap the tongue a few times (GENTLY so as not to break at base), then roll the guill(drone reed) between your hands. Repeat once if it doesn’t work the first time. Repeating too often can make the drone unsteady or too strong.
Some reccomend a single rib of hair placed under the tongue at the bound end. Or a matchstick placed under the tip of the tongue overnight. First is preferable to the second.
A dab of sealing wax, cobbler’s wax, beeswax or blue-tack weighting the end may keep it from clapping shut. It will also flatten the note and make the reed sound more strongly. Similar to shaving the base of the tongue. Warning: May make it unsteady. Try blue-tack first, if it solves the problem, use a more permanent wax.
If none of these work, get a new guill. If after a few guills that are known to work in other drones end up not working in yours, contact your pipemaker. There may be a bad relationship between your guill and the slide on your drone.
Best,
Dionys
I assume your drone reed is made of cane, with a tongue cut and split out of one side. When your drone cuts out, it could mean one of several things, but mostly the tongue is clamping shut because of the pressure.
Several ways to fix this. I don’t recommend placing a hair in the tongue (placed perpendicular to the length of the reed and under the base of the tongue…thus opening the tongue slightly). Some pipers do this.
Rather, take the end of the tongue and bend it open just a TINY bit, with your fingernail and fingertip at the end of the tongue and your thumb in the middle to keep the split from opening even more (careful). The grain in some cane is slightly curved in the wrong direction causing a natural tendency to close under pressure. Sometime just pulling the tongue out (without bending it) can cure the problem, but again, please be extremely careful.
Alternatively, if the reed has a staple tied around the reed at the base of the spit in the tongue…slide it down, thus opening up the reed (or tongue). You’ll have to tune the slide up on the drone after doing this to bring the pitch back up.
If a tongue is opening too much, rubbing the outer side of the tongue with the thumb can heat the wood and expand it, thus closing it. Or, you can move the bridle up. If a drone reed is fluttering, not seating properly, rolling it between two hands can help seat and match the closing edges so there are no air leaks.
Although scraping the tongue on the outside (thinning the thickness of the tongue) can help some reeds, this is used mostly for tuning. A few scrapes at the base lowers the pitch, many scrapes at the end raises the pitch. Weighting a tongue at the end lowers pitch and sometimes makes for a steadier playing reed under variable pressures.
Remmember the length of the split in the tongue determines the pitch. Also the diameter of the cane…the larger, the lower the pitch, generally. You can see there are several dynamics going on here.