After two years of my dainty little fingers slipping and sliding all over my non-scalloped chanter, I have found the solution to covering the holes with a high degree of reliability:
Cut a small (1/4"-3/8") square of duct tape and sprinkle 2 or 3 poppy seeds in the center.
Stick the tape on the far side of the hole, close to the edge but not covering it.
Repeat for all the holes that tend to spring leaks. (For me, that was all of the bottom-hand ones.)
The poppy seeds will provide a tiny bit of tactile feedback/traction, but won’t interfere with sealing the holes. Amazing, the difference when leaks are plugged. It was like getting a new chanter.
(This is my first post on this forum, since I realized it was just too pipe-geeky to put on Facebook.)
Interesting idea! Might want to use something less gummy than duct tape though, which does not age gracefully and whose glue might end up soaking into the grain of the wood more or less permanently. Gaffer’s tape or some other “low-tac” tape is probably better.
To be geekier still, 3M gaffer’s tape is better than Shur-Tape for your purposes: it’s less thick & stiff and will therefore give the desired princess/pea effect.
I suppose this is OK as a temporary measure - training wheels, as it were.
But it seems to me that, barring nerve damage or another physical problem, with proper finger pressure and position you should be able to feel the holes without the pips, and maybe some hand lotion to soften and condition the skin. Plenty of pipers successfully play non-scalloped chanters. And if you also play flute, I’d think your tactile sense is already developed.
Once you’re confident that you can seal the holes consistently, I would bin the pips ASAP if I were you.
The OP can speak for himself, but the way I read it, the whole point of the exercise is indeed just to train his fingers, and the tape/seed rig is strictly temporary.
Personally, I’ve (mostly) overcome the same problem playing my non-scalloped-holed C chanter, by simply shifting my right-hand fingers upwards whenever I squeak. Sure enough, I “find the holes” better every time I play.
But I can respect other players’ trying different ways to get to the same place. What better asset can a piper have than the ability to solve problems creatively?
Having said that, we should point out that duct-tape training wheels are much preferable to DIY scalloping, which I’ve heard of beginners “retrofitting” their chanter with. (The effect of which being, of course, to completely screw up tuning: scalloped chanters have to be designed that way. )
I agree with you MTG and will go one further: I think poppyseeds & duct tape are a really bad idea. sorry.
you will only have to unlearn all you did with the fixes, then re learn once you lose them. Superficially, considering your description, it seems to me you’d have better progress adjusting your hand position. But no one’s ever yet hammered a nail over the internet. dont give up.
I have seen an image of a Koehler & Quinn B chanter with tiny black “guide bumps” above and below the tone holes for the lower hand, placed by the makers. My (possibly faulty) recollection is that these were to address the needs of a customer who had suffered some nerve damage to that hand.
Thanks for the replies, everyone – and Mick especially for the suggestion on angling the fingers upwards. I’ve done lots of slow practice and experimented with moving my fingers up and down, forwards and backwards to find the “sweet spot” for perfect hole coverage, but I hadn’t thought about the angle at which the fingers cross the chanter. Hopefully the pips will be enough of a prompt to correct my hand position to the point where muscle memory will take over, and I will then restore my chanter to a state that no longer looks like a poppyseed breadstick wrapped in black plastic.
Oddly enough, these issues of finger placement completely disappear when I play scalloped chanters. I find them far more comfortable, though I’m well aware they’re not to everyone’s liking.
I play a scalloped-tonehole D chanter, and when I first got my C# non-scalloped chanter I resorted to gaffer-tape “blocks” on either side of the lower RH toneholes. I just wrapped the tape around and around the chanter to create little “finger corrals” around the problem holes.
Worked a treat and after about two weeks I didn’t need the tape anymore. I had no problem moving to a C chanter (also not scalloped), either. (Though I do break out the Bag Balm much more often for that one)
The only thing I wonder about is poppy seeds and critters like mice
But huzzah! I’m glad it works. I would, however, agree with the others about not using duct tape … especially with summer coming on.
