…and at noon today my chanter reed is jumping off the chart! The humidity is a 92% outside, prabably a little less inside. Natural humidity seems better for some reason. The chanter reed sounds/plays a little softer to the drones, the drones sound/perform the same though. Had to push the tuning pins in slightly on the ten & bar regs. I just had to come in from work and play’em a little.
I was surfing some u-pipe web sites and noticed some good advice from C. Roberts:
“..it’s better not to mess around with your reeds too much, as they can easily be ruined by over adjusting. For example: if you go to play one day and it sounds wrong/flat/sharp/awful etcetera, then don’t go adjusting the reed straight away. If the reed was playing fine the day before and it wasn’t touched, then it’s probably a case of the reed was in a place where it was hotter/colder than normal (e.g. left in the boot of a car/beside a radiator). So it is best just to leave the reed until its in the normal conditions it is used to. You should not play in hot sun or a particularly warm room as this will make the reed close up, and if you then proceed to open it you could ruin the reed. If you have to adjust your reed then follow and select the best option from the references below.”
I can’t recall if I mentioned this before (too lazy to search) but I’m at sea level about a 10-15 minute drive from Miami Beach and my pipes are usually in a room without air conditioning going. Just a fan in the window when I’m at work. Typically, this time of the year it’s 85 degrees F. and 85% relative humidity… a virtual sauna. When it’s too hot to play, I open the door to the hallway that lets cooler air into the room, but nothing radical.
I’ve noticed from time-to-time there are days where I can’t get a stable back D or days when back D is really sharp or the intonation is off, So… I put that chanter down, pick up another and woah… that one is doing the same thing. And another and another… so what do I have? 7 chanters in all and there are days where they all piss me off!!
A day or two later… everything is fine.
I’m thinking there’s more to this than temperature and relative humidity… could barometric pressure also have an effect on reeds??
Lorenzo, do you have the Blackbird CD, by Fling? You know Evertjan T’Hart plays a C. Roberts set also, but with a Dave Williams chanter. Just thought you’d like to know.
The Blackbird is one really amazing CD, just brilliant. If you don’t have it, you should.
I’ve got 65% humidity and my reed is perfect… actually, it was perfect at 40% as well.
elbogo…no I don’t have that one. I’ll try to pick one up if I get to Seattle in a couple of weeks for Folklife. Hey, if I had your Williams boxwood chanter to go with my Roberts set, maybe I could be just like him…you want to swap chanters for a few weeks? (just kidding)
tansy…you don’t know how true that is until you get one. Try clicking on that little email button on Alans post above.
BTW, does anyone know anything about Ian Goodfellow: Uillean pipes, flute and whistles? He plays on Catherine Crowe’s ablums and apparently hails fron Ontario, Canada.
The last I heard of Ian, he was not doing very well…
…poor guy has been in and out of the hospital for various ailments…
He and Catherine were married, now divorced, but all pretty amicable as I understand it. Are you refering to Catherine’s new CD, Larry? I haven’t heard it yet, and only know that she’s touring with the International Women right now. I will see her in a couple of months though…
Back to the subject…the other day here in jersey it was real foggy…I didnt check humidity level but it must have been high. My reed shut down the same way it did last winter with the dry air…Tony may be onto somthing with the barometric pressure…??? just another element beyond our control Maybe I could invent the pressure chamber for reeds with humitidy control valves ..heck it might even be a chanter when I’m done???
Or MAYBE, we could make a little tiny chamber that would fit onto the inlet valve of the bellows, and fill it with kitty litter . . . and it would then suck some of the moisture out of the air before it gets to the pipes.
OR, we could wrap some kind of tubing around the blowpipe and cool the blowpipe down with some external A/C system so that any humidity collects in the blowpipe and then we could take the blowpipes off and get rid of the pseudospit occasionally.
SERIOUSLY . . . those of you who live in variable climates must REALLY have a hard time with reeds. My own experience, based on living in a swamp, is that reeds that work well in >80% relative humidity tend to work better at low humidity than do reeds that start off life in low humidity and then move to the swamps. I guess I have anecdotal evidence that this isn’t a trend; otherwise, pipe reeds made in Ireland would work better over here.
Maybe it is a trend, though . . . A/C doesn’t take as much humidity out, relatively speaking, than would be achieved by heating colder, drier air. Hmm. Saturation vapor pressure goes up as temperature goes up . . . hmm. I don’t know.
All I know is that even when the indoors here is air-conditioned, boxwood swells to beat the band.
Maybe I could invent the pressure chamber for reeds with humitidy control valves ..heck it might even be a chanter when I’m done???