Just got back for playing at a small pipers gathering in Denver…5000 feet above sea level.
I heard horror stories about playing there from Liam O’Flynn, Benedict Koehler and others, their pipes going crazy. Once in Denver the local pipers told me more stories about problem pipes of passing pipers and assured me that my pipes would go crazy. Well…they didn’t they played beautifully.
My pipes, in the key of C, played beautifully for a number of reasons.
I have my pipes set up so that they are very, very easy to play. The weight of your arm wil play my pipes. I noticed that my pipes played harder even though the reeds were set easy. If your pipes have hard or even medium pressure reeds then you will have problems performing in the thin air, thin reeds require more air to get the same results. A hard reed will make you strain your guts out.
If you are going to play at a high altitude then make yourself a set of easy playing reeds and you wil be in good shape. I asume that the reverse is true. If you are a high altitude piper then you will probably need a tougher set of reeds to play at low altitude.
I agree. I am from Boulder and missed the gathering in question, but I have had very little trouble with my Koehler reed since I moved back to CO from MA. The reed was made in Vermont in January and therefore doesn’t mind dry weather. It generally sounds good, although it has been known to close up on the upper octave (which is a lot of fun when you end up playing “Wandering Minstrel” solo at a session and the upper octave completely disappears in the C part of the tune… wheeee).
However, I just returned from a trip to England and Ireland where everyone thought my reed was too weak and quiet, except for the girl who lived down the hall from my boyfriend at Cambridge and yelled at me for practicing about 5pm and disturbing her homework time. Now my boyfriend has a fancy sound system with giant speakers, and I was tempted to find his most obnoxious music – say Welsh rap – and blast it. Yeah, how do you like that? Welcome to living in a dorm. If noise bothers you, study in the bloody library.
I digress. My point is that my reed was unhappy in a supposedly more “uilleann pipe friendly” environment. It was too weak and too easy to play. Those of us who live in dry weather and travel occasionally need at least two reeds.
Denver, Salt Lake, and many other western towns have more than most seem to think they know. It’s the altitude. You’ve got to move more molecules of air past the reed when they’re spread out all thin like. Anyone try to play at the top of Everst? That’d be a feat! Pumping like mad just to get a single chanter note I bet! And don’t hit that switch - or headlines of: Man killed by rabid air-sucking drones might appear on the next Weekly World News!
Anyway, pipes DO in fact work out here - some better than others. It does tend to separate the piddly reed-makers from the stellar ones in a hurry though!
