Brad Angus of Vancouver, WA 360-699-4409.
I’m very happy with my narrow bore D from Ray. Besides being quieter, the reed is also narrower..this makes it ‘different’ to reed, not necessary better or worse, just different than the majority of chanters.
Oh by the way, welcome to C&F!
Regarding woods, there is a lot of discussion about the affect of different wood on sound quality, etc…but I don’t think there is much concensus. Choose whatever wood you like, which looks best to you and the maker is comfortable with.
Regards,
Gary
Curious newbie question: Can you play a narrow bore chanter with drones/regs from a full bore set? Do you need to adjust or change the reeds in any way so the drones don’t overpower the chanter, or is it not an issue?
Cheers,
Mark
Bo, Joe Kennedy has a very good rep for his narrow-bore stuff, but that means you may have a bit of a wait, depending on what you’re looking for.
http://www.kennedysuilleannpipes.com/
MarkS, the different parts of wide and narrow bore sets can be physically played together, but you won’t get the correct balance of tone between them. Also, you may find the wide bore parts too loud for the narrow bore chanter. Sets are designed as a whole, and trying to slap together different unrelated bits and pieces is not necessarily going to get you a good sounding set.
djm
To be honest, I have never heard a narrow bore D chanter that I like. The best of them sounded very similar to the sound given off by a soda straw.
The Medium/ wide bore Chanter has more tone and volume both of which can be controlled by the type of reed fitted to the chanter. I have a special smaller reed, for my own medium bore Rowsome pipes, that is very soft and quiet so that I can play without waking up the house.
If you want a narrow bore consider going to the flat C or B chanters which are the Cadillacs of pipes. Pipes in these keys have a better tone and are very easy to reed. I also have a Rowsome C set which by comparison makes my D set sound like automobile horns.
All the best,
Pat Sky
All the best,
Pat Sky
Like Snoogie I also have a Ray Sloan narrow bore D chanter. It plays very well, is mellow, more like a flat set and I’m very pleased with the sound. Excellent when you are learning not to be filling the entire house with your mistakes!
Pat, what are your thoughts on a C# ?
Seamus Ennis, Kevin Rowsome, JoeMcKenna and a few others play the C# pipes which qualify as flat pipes and have a beautiful sound. My preference is C, which to my ear, has a fuller sound.
Pat
I have a narrow D in ebony by Brad Angus that I really like. Of course, it’s my first and only chanter some I’m not speaking with much experience. The one thing you’ll notice is that the holes aren’t scalloped like they are on many wide bore chanters. Just these tiny little holes.
-Patrick
I would have to second what Pat said. I prefer large bore for D and a quieter reed.
I don’t think large bore chanters are scalloped very often. Scalloping is not preferable, but used to tune the note.
Bo, There’s plenty of narrow bore D discussions in the archives.
You can use the search function or click of some of the ones below:
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=18558&highlight=ivory&sid=956fe801fab8e6564c4209cfd7b68dc6
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=14304&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=narrow&start=0&sid=956fe801fab8e6564c4209cfd7b68dc6
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=11047&highlight=narrow&sid=956fe801fab8e6564c4209cfd7b68dc6
The important thing to remember is that no uilleann chanter needs to be quieter. More responsive, more in-tune, maybe even lighter or heavier, or just matched to your drones and the rest of the set. But not “quieter.” That’s not a “quality.” That at best a side-effect, usually a detremental one.
If you want any concert D set, wide bore in particular, to be quieter, there is something seriously wrong with your perceptions of the instrument. Nobody says, “I just bought this great saxophone, now how do I make it quieter so I can’t be heard in the band and I can practice all night and not bother my wife?”
And nobody goes on to seriously entertain asinine suggestions like stuffing cotton in the bell, or shaving down the reed, or gluing or taping wads of padding on the reed. It’s just silly that exactly this sort of mentality keeps manifesting itself in the uilleann pipe, world, well, I guess really only from novices who should probably just be playing nylon-stringed guitar and finger-picking out “Greensleeves.”
Really, what’s wrong with you people? Even the loudest concert D wide bore isn’t a loud instrument! Chuckle chuckle guffaw! Most of you have pipes struggling to be heard over the novice fiddler next to you, choking her little strings down and playing lightly on the very tip of her bow.
A narrow bore D? What’s that? Practicing? An uilleann practice chanter? What a concept! What are you practicing? Not to play uilleann pipes! If you want to learn to play a concert D chanter you won’t get there playing a throttled down, constricted little narrow bore anything. If you like the flat sound, just get a C set and live with the choice. Get a real narrow bore chanter and set to go with it, C, B, Bb whatever. Narrow bore D’s are in fact weak, feeble, unresponsive, castrated, neutered and barely audible over a harp–and not then if the harpist is breathing very heavily. There never was and never was supposed to be a narrow bore D design. It’s a back-engineered, foppish, faddish, yuppyish, ignorant, addlepated, uninformed, pedestrian, recorder-based, early-music crowd faux paus that for some reason pipe makers, one or two, have stooped to pander to.
I think the most I could say about the concept of a narrow bore D design, is that somebody who normally plays a full narrow bore set, flat set, C or lower etc, who occasionally wants to play along with others in D, could then respectably perhaps, and quite logically, have a higher pitched narrow bore made simply to match the operating pressure of his narrow bore drones, or at least mimic some of the narrow bore behavior he’s used to. It’s a bastard, mongrel, half-arsed way to back-pedal into playing with others. You would never just start from there because it’s simply wrong, daft, and loonie. It’s going to get you by playing with others in concert D pitch, but it will never ever be “as good” as a real wide bore concert D set.
How loud a set of pipes gets when set up to “work properly” is how loud they are, end of story. Modern concert D, widebores, are just louder than the narrower, flatter predecessors. They just are, have been and always will be, because for one thing, that was one of the reasons they were invented. Why would you deliberately destroy the performance, tuning, and stability of your pipes so you can play dress-up at the session, act like you’re playing but not let anyone hear you so they can’t tell how bad you are? You’re deliberately learning how not to play well, how not to sound well, how not to tune well, and how not to perform in public.
It’s just “air uilleanns.” Buy a keyboard or a guitar and turn the volume down instead. Buy a three-voice button box, and only use one voice–and then tape heavy padding over the grille on that set of reeds so even they aren’t audible.
If you say, “I love the sound of uillean pipes, I’ve always wanted to learn to play them,” and then destroy the sound of yours, and learn how not to play them instead, because you ignorantly presume to emasculate your reeds to the point your whole experience is one of attempted base functionality and partially-tolerable tuning, you’re just schizophrenic.
To go to all the bother to lay waste to the lumber and assemble a so-called “narrow-bore D” set is a crime against the music and tradition. The end result is a brutalized, dead piece of rainforest with only personal laziness being served. Work a little harder. Learn a little better. Be a little prouder.
Get a normal concert D set if you want to play in concert D pitch.
And if you have a normal concert D set, just concentrate on making them “work properly,” not on making them “quieter.” If you learn to play them and make them sound good, you won’t want or need “quieter.”
Royce
There’s a great highland piper for ya! 
All in good fun royce! 
Nice diatribe, Royce, but you’ve got it bass-ackwards. What we call “narrow bore” and “flat sets” today are what was the original or “norm” for UP design until the late 19th - early 20th century when the wide bore was first developed. I’m sure the history of the UPs has been hashed over enough times here about various tunings, etc. but to claim that concert D/wide bores are the only correct form of UPs is dead wrong. Sorry, but going for the smoother sounds of narrow bore is actually getting back to the original nature of these beasties, and certainly should still be considered a valid option today.
djm
Royce in his own colourful way has a point and ye seem to have missed it!He is not saying that concert pitch is the traditional pitch per se but is the norm for a lot of pipers these days and rather than go for a “narrow bore D” then get a flat pitch.(incidentally C or Bb is not strictly speaking flat{Baroque }pitch so that leaves ye C# or B although C and Bb have been accepted into the flat pipe world)So that leaves ye with quite a big choice.Do ye want to be a solo player or do ye want to be a groupie in sessions?or put another way do ye want to be a flat set or concert set player?Of course there is nothing to stop ye getting a narrow bore chanter but ye wont be taking it to sessions so ye would have to buy a concert pitch anyway!If its a question of neighbours then a compromise should be saught with them,practice from 7pm to 8pm say,or maybe ye could use a hall or if the weather is fine find an open space somewhere.If there is a pipers club or piper near ye then ye could get lessons there and practice too!! 1/2 fiddles etc are a complete red herring..there is no such thing as a practice or student chanter(despite the claims of some pipmakers)a chanter wether keyed or not is quite simply a CHANTER! so ye are not going to graduate from anything! There is a lot more in Royces’ post than ye are giving credit for(well actually ye are giving no credit at all!)So maybe ye should read it again,he has a view and I tend overall to agree with him,but in maybe slightly less prosaic language! 
Slan Go Foill
Uilliam
I go with Royce, particularly with the ‘shrinking violet’. Narrowbore D is not a chance to sound like a ‘flat piper with friends’, they are just quieter, less resonant, less expressive than Concert Pitch Wide Bores, and not easy to reed either. I can’t say I’ve ever come across a narrow bore D in a session, so I guess it’s not a common solution
The ones I’ve come across have been fine in as much as they play in tune and have UP characteristics.
What astounds me is that UPipers go and divide their camp with a ‘Flat Pipes are intellectual and Concert Pitch is insensitive, uncouth’. Pipes in general, in the wrong hands, just sound shite whatever.
I’m not sure that we all do. At their best though both schools sound nicely different ,I’d like to think that some of us still celebrate that difference.
I have to admit that I haven’t played a narrow bore beast in D yet that has made me dribble, and the ones that I have heard/ tried did seem to offer less tonal colour to the player than wider bored yokes. I can still see uses though for the learner who wishes to practice discreetly although I’m not convinced that the ones that I’ve tried would be the best instrument to learn solely on.
At any rate I think that the ‘narrow bore D age’ is/ has(?) been an interesting experiment. Medium or medium-ish bores are a different teapot of eels altogether of course (narrower, narrowish and narrowist being the new technical terms for what I assume we are talking about here 
)
Regards,
Harry.
You need to work on the encode-decode problem there laddie. I’ve not got it wrong at all. The wide bore D is not only the “correct” or “normal” or “real” form of the D uilleann chanter/pipes, it’s the only one. There is and never has been historically, any other D, there is only wide bore. You’re just disagreeing with yourself if you contend otherwise. And contrary to any contention read here, a so-called “narrow bore D” is not going back to any sound ever heard ever. It’s not a good “flat” sound in the least. It’s not “flat sounding” at all. It’s just lame “concert D” sounding. it sounds like a badly reeded, badly set up, and usually poorly played wide bore wannabe. It does not in any way sound like a “flat set.”
A narrow bore being thought of as pitched in C, B, Bb, is pretty much a recent convention as well, because they aren’t really in any of those “keys” they just call their D a D at a lower frequency. Even the C# sets are probably best thought of as wide-bore because they went up that high not entirely to match a pitch but mainly to get more volume or a brighter tone or whatever elusive quality that particular maker was experimenting with on that chanter, the pitch rose as a side-effect of opening up the bore a bit.
I suppose it was the Rowsome/Taylor shops that first conscienciously said to themselves, “Let’s match the pitch of the box and piano.” And coupled that deliberately with increased volume and projection. When “concert pitch” was adopted in this manner, meaning A=440 or more precisely, 4=442, because that’s closer to what the Italian boxes were playing at and still do from what I’ve measured personally locally, the union of the wider bore and higher pitch only then became the “original concert D” pipes.
Nobody ever ever played “narrow bore” D sets, in the sense of universal pitch standard. Everybody’s D was D, it was just a helluva lot flatter than concert pitch. In fact, if you go back to the presumed “pastoral” or “new” bagpipe, just judging by the length of the chanter, bottom D was probably an A or close to it by modern standards, like border or smallpipes. A was and is “God’s own key” in the Scottish traditions anyway. But until the need to fit into Irish Traditional music along with fiddlers, and particularly set-pitch players like box players, no real D-based on A=440-442 pipes existed, narrow or otherwise. Now, in my humble and respectful opinion, there’s no practical reason to invent a narrow bore D at this late stage of the game. It’s back-engineering a new invention, not returning to any standard or tradition that ever existed.
If you’re playing a long, narrow bored chanter/pipes your D is still D. If it makes you feel better you can call it by whatever name modern orchestral instruments would call the nearest frequency to which it falls. But it’s still a D. My D doesn’t have to be the same as yours. Who decided that eh? There’s something wrong with your head if it be thinking otherwise. You don’t be thinking like a piper.
I keep hearing about all these Eb sessions in Ireland. There aren’t any. There may be sessions where D is a half tone higher than our modern conventional frequency assignments decree, but D is still D in a so-called Eb session. It’s just not the same pitch as Yanni’s D. It’s the same as Yanni’s Eb. If Yanni wants to bring his Korg, well, he can either use global retune and make his D tune to the session, or, because of his perverted musical conventionalism, he can just move up a half step and play in Eb. Yanni feels better because he doesn’t have to change his mindset as long as he keeps his mouth shut, and doesn’t say something like, “Let’s go back to measure 17 where the pipes come in on the Bb”–because, I’m not coming in on a Bb, I’m playing an A. And not even an A#, which I find clearer and a far more expressive a key than Bb…
So back to Taylor/Rowsome wide bore’s: that’s the only D chanter design that ever existed in history that actually played at or near “concert” pitch.
Having said all this, nobody ever in 1842 sat down with a big long, narrow chanter and said, “This is too loud.” No piper or maker has ever deliberately scratched head and thought seriously about how to give their pipes less projection and clarity. No, even in the old days the only question was how to be heard, and heard cleanly, brightly, tunefully and reliably. But never, heard lessly. That’s almost the definitive quality of any bagpipes. Not even Northumberland pipers blip and peep around wondering amongst themselves how not to be heard so much, and they’ve got one of only a very few bagpipes that really are pretty quiet.
Indeed, I overheard two Northumberland pipers telling a wire-strung harpist to “quit hammering away on that blaring nuisance” at a session the other day because, between that and the fizzing the Guinnes was making at the head of the pints you couldn’t hear the Northumberland pipers.
And there’s a load of piping misfits for you: Northumberland pipers. They’re now of course, making a lot of microscopically drilled true concert G sets I hear, and I know some pipers are playing D sets at concert pitch, but they’re traditionally somewhere around F plus, often thought of as around F#: Just try to work that into an Irish session. I suppose, if you did think of it as F, you could play in “C” and “F” along with guitar and piano and C boxes and that ilk, but you’d be at least 25 or more cents sharp of “concert” pitch even at that, and probably closer to 50 cents sharp of F or C etc.
Which has never bothered Highland pipers, who play A=476+ these days, and the best you can do is think of A as Bb and add 30-40 cents to it correction to really be tuned. If it got a bit higher you could play in B I suppose, but nobody’s working on that right now, and they’re making concert A chanters for those who have to play with fiddles etc., as has become so popular with the kids nowadays. I remember when I did that with a full pipe band, a drum kit, bass and electric/acoustic guitars in the late 70’s early 80’s and all I got was, “Why do you have to play that Irish shite?”
But I digress.
When the wide uilleann bores came out and the pitch of a “true” D chanter was set, this notion of trying to make the pipes (whichever pipes you care to talk about, as they almost all had a previously independent musical tradition that needed adaptation) fit into more popular, mainstream, academically-designed instruments was again the driving force for said developments. The only point of going up to “concert” pitch was to play with and against the boxes and pianos and over the crowds of the pubs and music and dance halls the pipes were now encountering.
If you don’t want or need to play in D, if you don’t like the modern wide bore D sound, don’t buy or play any pipes in D. The sound you’re looking for is somewhere between C/C# and Bb or so. The sound and feel you’re looking for is about 17-18" long, has little baby holes and a reed that behaves almost entirely differently from a concert D wide bore. It isn’t a different version of the same instrument, it’s more like a different instrument. If you want that sound, learn that chanter. Don’t castrate a D wide bore designed to sing over the Hohners and to musically humble fiddle-sawing hacks with one pop. Just buy the real thing you want in the first place, whichever real thing you actually want.
Choosing between wide bore and narrow bore D is ridiculous. There is no narrow bore D. It has not existed and should not exist. How is it then I keep hearing these wistfull shopping-trip ponderings as if choosing the color or your toenail polish? They aren’t even the same instrument, any more than an English horn is the same as a bassoon just because they both have reeds, or even double reeds. Or because you blow into them. It’s the most naive, sub-comprehensive debate I’ve ever suffered repeatedly until I have the urge to either kill or take my own life just to relieve the pain.
You’re sitting there in your novicial mindlessness wondering, hmm, I think I’ll be either a brain surgeon or maybe a bus mechanic…
So again, I don’t have it backwards. The so-called “narrow-bore D” is a bastard runt of an abomination that generations of makers and pipers deliberately refused to invent. It not only wasn’t developed, it wasn’t even considered for a couple of hundred years of masterful pipes and players. And now suddenly we have this perverted little mongrel being debated nearly every time somebody wants to start playing pipes. Why?
I just don’t get it.
Royce
(And I mean this in a loving and supportive way.)
Sorry, dude, you’re way off the mark here. There are existing older sets that go from what we today call a Bb right up to an Eb/E. They were all built long before wide bore D came along. There were many different tuning standards in the past, including A=439Hz up to 453Hz. Many of the older sets are noted to NOT quite meet any pitch standard, leading to various comments that many pipemakers in the 18th-19th centuries were winging it, getting the set to sound in tune to itself. Since there was no concept of playing with other instruments, there was no pressure to meet any tuning standards. That kind of requirement really only came in with the early 20th century, along with the need for greater volume to be heard in “concert” settings.
I agree with you fully that the wide bore D tuned to A=440Hz is the only worthwhile option if one wants to play in sessions with other instruments, but there is no need to put others off of a narrow bore if they think it will meet their personal requirements, and that really is my only point.
djm