Hi friends, my two B reeds from Joe Kennedy, kept well safe in a plastic canister, have collapsed after two years. They were new and excellent in every aspect and so were kept unplayed for the future if my working reed died. Now, it happened and I have no reeds.
After my initial proofs they have been in a humidified room for five days and (grrr!!) no solution. Closed and leaking sides.
How do you keep the reeds you don´t use, knowing they will last years in that state?
I swap my concert chanter reeds around every few weeks (I don’t have a flat set). IMHO reeds need to be played regularly or they die, this is especially true if they have not been played much in their lifetime.
I wouldn’t give up on them yet though. Can they be played at all ?
Changes in temperature can cause a reed to collapse, even if they are kept in an airtight container.
I’ve had some luck with reviving collapsed reeds. This is what I do:
Measure the overall length of the reed and keep a note of the length.
Remove the staple from the reed and then remove all the binding.
Take the cane slips and wet them on both sides with a light oil - Neets Foot Oil is what I have used. Remove the excess oil from the cane slips with a kleenex.
Get a sanding block, a piece of pvc pipe or a bottle (between 35 and 50 mm diameter) and securely tie the oiled cane slips to the block/pipe/bottle with unwaxed thread. Make sure that the curve of the block/pipe/bottle matches the curve of the cane slips.
Allow the cane slips to dry - this will probably take a few days.
When the slips are dry, reassemble your reed, making sure that the reassembled reed is the same overall length as it was before you took it apart.
With luck, the cane slips will have reacquired the desired shape. I managed to do this 3 times over 2 years with one reed.
Oh, wow, I’m sorry to hear that. Gaaaah! I suppose it doesn’t help, but I’m grateful for your post as I was just wondering if I should play my old chanter (misery!) every now and again, just to keep the reed alive (I think it’s a good reed, just not a happy marriage with the chanter).
Any ideas on how much suffering – er, playing – on that old chanter/reed combo would be sufficient to keep the reed viable?
(I ain’t touching ANYTHING on the new one; it’s going too well. I don’t even take the reed cap off!)
I don’t think that playing a chanter reed will stop it from collapsing. In my experience, fluctuations in temperature and humidity will do more to cause a reed to collapse than just not playing it. Of course, the more temperature and humidity change, the more the piper has to adjust the reed, which also hastens its demise.
If a reed is kept somewhere where the temperature and humidity are steady, I suspect it would last a long time.
For my money, the best way to keep a reed in playing condition is to actually play it now and then. Failing that, learn how to make the little squeakers.
Indeed… learn how to make… AFTER you can play about 30-50 tunes...very well! By then, you’ll be more than prepared to be able to handle the frustrations of reed making.
At that juncture (provided that you have been playing on a very good reed) you’ll have an excellent idea of all the acrobatics of good reed should be able to do. It is at that point that your skill as a player can act as the proverbial banister to your reed making.
While I agree with this in principle, I think one should learn to make their own reeds much sooner, if only to attempt to replace the broken ones that usually seem to plague beginners.
I’m only now recovering from spending my first 8 or 9 months with a split one! I just thought it was me.
It is indeed a conundrum. Need good reed to learn to play, need to learn to make good reed to play, need to learn to be a good enough player to know if the reed one made is any good.
I got out the old chanter and “spare” reed (a Tionol-triage replacement for the cracked one) last night, fired things up, and even in 78% humidity it hurt a LOT less than when I put this pair down last April. I could get hard Ds, run scales up to & down from high Bs (it’s a keyless so that’s as far as I know) without issue, and overall things were reasonably in tune. I had to work the bag harder than I do with my new chanter & reed, but … ?
Somehow, playing 5 months on a more user-friendly chanter & reed seems to have made it much easier to get more of what I want out of a combo that’s less so.
Interesting.
Side note: Maybe we could use a sticky with do’s and dont’s for beginners and reeds?
For the last months I’ve kept my chanter with reed, and drones and extra reeds in a sealed plastic case with a soaked sponge and a digital hygrometer to monitor the humidity. Works like a charm and when I play the pipes or go for a gig or session I put a soaked sponge into the bellows. I attach a string to the sponge so I can get it out quite easily.
Rob
Brevity is indeed the soul of wit But I probably could have used it. (Alas, I could have especially used a note that said “your reed is NOT like an oboe reed. It’s SUPPOSED to be dry!”)
Seriously, though, with all the “in medias res” talk of opening and closing and upping and downing bridles and maybe scraping maybe not maybe a bit of wax on the sides maybe not + the dearth of stuff on the subject in, say, Clarke … it can take a while to get the Zen of the thing, especially if you’ve played other instruments that generally show up for work when you want them to.
So your suggestion might be a perfect Square One.
Now to try to figure out about that leaky bag that once again, I thought was me until told otherwise.
Sometimes, a long humid session will cause the reed to go flatter over the course of the evening, causing the player to close the bridle more and more as the night wears on. Under these circumstances, open it back up at the end of the evening before putting it away. This will retain the curvature of the lips and ensure you still have some verve in the blades next time you have a go at them. Under no circumstances should you put them away wet and closed, as you will only force the life out of them as they dry out. The same goes for seasonal adjustments. Though the reed, in winter, may start to feel easier to blow, it should be gradually sprung open for a few weeks or months. This starts in the fall here in the Mid-Atlantic, maybe October, and continues until the following year until it is gradually closed down again in the spring, as the humidity increases. You should always be trying to make, or look for, a better reed. However, the reed in your chanter will inevitably be the best one you have. Forget the one in your case. If it was better than the one you have in your chanter, you would have been playing it. If it is halfway decent, and you want to keep it, ease it open with the bridle as much as possible before putting it away. And if you put it away in the summer, start opening it up more in the fall along with your regular reed, and tune them both gradually as the winter dry sets in.
I dug oot two reeds frae ma box and put them in ma chanter to play…one was made in 1951 and the other in 1975.They r both fine.Guess the climate must make all the difference.
Uilliam
No doubt. Here in Maryland, RH is 90% in the summer and 20% in the winter. It’s no wonder the instrument was invented in Ireland, where it rains ALL THE FUCKIN TIME.
There’s one problem with putting the pipes aside if weather doesn’t cooperate, and waiting, and I think Juan Pablo has encountered it.
Putting reeds in a sealed box doesn’t protect them from changes in relative humidity - in fact it can do the contrary - unless the box is also temperature controlled. It’s almost surely not the temperature changes that do the damage, but the changes in relative humidity.
Warm air has a greater moisture capacity than cold air. This means that cooling a sealed box will result in higher relative humidity inside the box, and can even cause condensation to form. Similarly, a sealed box at 30% relative humidity at 10 degrees C - low but ‘reasonable’, will drop to less than 10% RH if warmed to 35 degrees C, the sort of shock that can result in a crack. That same box, if closed at a happy 50% RH at 35 degrees C, will end up at dew point, wet on the inside, if cooled just to 22 degrees C. That’s a recipe for reed collapse for sure. Even if you don’t reach a sweltering 35 degrees, the same thing will happen going from 25 degrees C (50% RH) to 14 degrees C (100% RH) - a perfectly ordinary indoor temperature range. If anyone is interested in the numbers, engineers use what are called “psychrometric charts” to relate moisture capacity to air temperature - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PsychrometricChart-SeaLevel-SI.jpg (This is also why “sweat” forms on a beer glass…)
Now, if the reed box is not totally moisture-tight, it will equilibrate to the outside relative humidity, so unless temperature changes are sudden you won’t get this temperature-related problem. However, relative humidity swings in the outside air can still cause problems. If the humidity changes such that the reed closes up entirely, it can warp or “collapse” so that it doesn’t spring back with the weather changes again.
If a reed is played regularly, and the player knows how to adjust the reed bridle to keep the correct aperture, the chances of such damage are probably reduced. The reed can still die due to clumsy adjustment or misadventure, but this explains why the “playing” reed may survive longer than the pristine reed that’s kept in storage. For the above reason, I can’t entirely recommend the “hands off” approach to reed maintenance and adjustment - I do recommend caution but sometimes one needs to know how to keep the reed aperture and storage conditions within reasonable parameters. I notice that some reedmakers, for instance David Daye, do recommend that players routinely move the adjustable bridle more “open” before putting the pipes away - this is to minimize the chances of the reed being left in a “too closed” position for any length of time. Don’t over do it - since a “too open” reed that opens to an extreme extent may crack spontaneously - however in my experience this is a much less common occurrence than reed collapse.
I’m only now recovering from spending my first 8 or 9 months with a split one! I just thought it was me.
Brevity is indeed the soul of wit 
Horses for courses…