Hello from the uilleann side of the force;
I am considering getting hold of a concert pitch chanter, and ran across the MacLellan chanter in A. Has anyone had experience with one of these? If not, is there another stick out there that someone can recommend? My trio plays in concert pitch, and it may be fun sometime to pull out the GHB in a gig for kicks.
maze
The only problem would be that the drones would still be set up to play sharp of Bb…I remember there was info on a website years ago (I think it was the old Bagpipe Web page) for drastically flattening GHB drones to play with A=440 chanters, but it would significantly affect the “oomph” of a good set of drones…It would be better to just get a set of A=440 pipes, but they’re not cheap…
A friend of mine got one of those MacLellan chanters. He was very happy with it. To get round the problem with tuning drones there are two things you can do:
Tune one of the tenors to A (by lengthening the reed with a bit of tubing) and one to Bb. Stopping the relevant drone when you’re playing the A or Bb chanter. Then tune your bass so you’ve got enough room to tune it to Bb or A.
My mate just made a set of A drone reeds by buying a spare set and lengthening them with copper tubing. You just swap them over when you need to. I wouldn’t worry about the drones not having as much “oomph” as you’re going to be playing with a band and it won’t be noticeable.
I say it’s not worth the expense of buying another set of pipes in A as they’re very expensive. If you were interested in that option Hamish Moore does a nice set.
About drones for an A=440 chanter, Mark Wygent makes (or at least used to make) special sets of synthetic drone reeds which made normal GHB drones play down in A. I have a set of normal Wygent synthetic reeds playing in A. I got them that low by making extenders out of brass tubing.
I lowered my drones to A by making longer cane drone reeds. No lack of oomph and less than an hour invested in making and tuning them.