Has anyone come up with a metal chanter? David Daye has shown that you can take a p[astic tube and make a chanter out of it. I have seen an all brass set of highland pipes. Silver, if memory serves me correctly has also been used. My brass bass drone has a rich deep sound that I love. There must be a reason a lot of reed caps are metal. What’s the scoop?
Off the top of my head: Kevin Henry always carried two metal chanters, one of them double. There’s one made by Johnny Doran. Other historic examples as well. And weren’t Daye’s penny chanters made in brass?
The Doran chanter:
It only played two or three notes? Is there a front picture of the chanter? I have to wonder if octave tuning would become a bit more ‘linear’ with no real wall thickness…maybe not linear, but a predictable curve?
it only played two or three notes?
A bit of a silly question, isn’t it? Considering it is obviously an image showing the back of the chanter.
There are, as far as I can see, only partial images of the front. The lot is up on the npu archive.
One of my four chanters is a Daye penny chanter . As I look at it, the bottom hand is brass. The top hand is an “off white plastic tube assembly and decorative ring.” The whole chanter is lined with a set of graduated brass tubes. Thanks for the response and great photo Mr. Gumby. I imagine it was the conical bore that kept a lot woodworkers away from metal. Don’t know about tone.
I seem to remember trying a penny chanter Wally Charm had that was all brass but the memory of it isn’t clear, twenty five years ago and all that. The Kevin Henry ones were Taylor-ish. I remember them as well made. But again, not a very detailed memory.
Leo rowsome plays a.double metal chanter on the drones and chanters I believe (my darling asleep).
I wonder where the chanter ended up.
I have a chanter made from a bicycle seat stay. My dad realised that the internal taper was an approximation of a D chanter and decided to see if it would work. To some degree it did and subsequently he made a regulator out of the other side!
That’s what you get for an engineer making pipes…
Here’s pictures of Felix Doran’s silver chanter, made by Leo Rowsome, and played here by Neillidh Mulligan:
IIRC, Marcus Coulter made at least one all-metal chanter. I saw photos somewhere on this site.
[Thread revival. - Mod]
Just bringing up this old thread as I came across an all aluminium chanter this morning.
It was made by Pat McNulty, who gave it to the current owner. He is supposed to ‘have made a few’. It is beautifully made, plays surprisingly well and is, according to the owner, quite easy to read.
So, just for the record, there you go.
That was the usual ebony Taylor chanter. Or at least the liner notes don’t day it’s metal, nor those of the Rowsome EP with that track and another on the same chanter, nor do any of the accounts of Pat Ward (the original owner) say anything about him playing a stick you could stir fireplace ashes with.
My first regulators were McNulty. About as ugly as can be imagined, but they were easy to get going. They had coil springs, too. A metal chanter sounds like something he’d give a shot.
Pat McNulty, by all accounts, was a great man for the aluminium.
Here’s a pic of the chanter in question. The reed cap doesn’t belong to it, originally. Coil springs for the keys.
Thanks! Very interesting. And much more conventional than Pat’s usual work: As it happens I was just catching up with An Píobaire, and Vol 19 No 4 has a picture of a full McNulty/Hunter set. I only ever owned the regs - and had no way to mount the bass. Someone once described to me how it worked - that strap thingy coming off the mainstock - I couldn’t visualize it at all. Obviously you needed everything built by Pat for it to work.
When I bought them almost every keyblock had been broken, then repaired. Despite this, as I said, they worked and sounded OK. But the reed caps always looked like Toronto’s CN Tower, and that plastic was familiar from ballpoint pens etc. Not so elegant.
As it happens I was just catching up with An Píobaire, and Vol 19 No 4 has a picture of a full McNulty/Hunter set.
The chanter was marked both McNulty and Hunter.
