I’ve made some nice tenor drone reeds from twigs of Norway Maple, Acer platanoides, a very common street and ornamental tree. Its leaf is used as the logo of the Toronto Maple Leafs ice hockey team. Go Leafs! These are very hard twigs-I always snap a few strings making the tongue. Huh? you say. I cut a notch with a straight razor, then pull a string down the length of the reed to make the tongue, a method for making guills I obtained from the new edition of Dave Hegarty’s reedmaking book, which is THE BEST to own if you ask me-it’s got about 20 different approaches to everything in there. Old time piper Eamonn Ceant described this technique in a set of instructions he wrote, using silk for the string. I’ve found silk snaps too readily, and prefer polyester.
The bore of these twigs is small, at most narrow baritone drone reed size. I’ve also made bass drone reeds from Big Leaf Maple, Acer macrophyllum, which is very soft-I wound up fine grit sanding the tongue. Most of the twigs you’ll find are too punky and disintegrate with a slight twist, but some will do, giving a mellow, quiet reed, good perhaps for calming down blastamatic bass drones. The books don’t describe it as a pithy twig, strangely enough. I gathered all my stuff last summer on a long extinct volcanic cone, maybe the soil was a factor in some way.
Far out! 
I have made some chanter reeds that work pretty well and are fairly stable out of flat strip bass wood. I get the wood from local hobby shops in strips 3" wide 2’ long and 1/16" thick. From there I slice it into slips with an x-acto knife. Then I shade both sides with pencil lead to see my shaping efforts. Change x-acto blades to a curved one with about a 1’ inside arc. (looks like a miniature cycle) and scrape the outside arc the length of the slip until the pencil marks are all gone. I give this side a few passes with 400 grit paper at this point. Then I sand the inside arc on a piece of 1 3/4" dowell until the pencil marks are gone on that side. This makes the slip about .060" thick. Measure and mark tail lines and the slip center and then carve the tails. Then I shade the area on the ouside arc between the tail lines so I can see the initial reed scrape. I scrape an oval until I have the center at about .038 inches and the the rest of the oval is uinformly thicker and thicker toward its edges. Chop the reed in half and tie it to my staple and follow other prescribed methods for mounting and tuning with a chanter. The ones I have made so far hold their tuning well and seem more stable than cane.
Best regards,
Scott McCallister