Plastic Regulator Reeds

Uilleann Pipes
1

I have seen plans on David Daye’s page for plastic regulator reeds. Does anyone have experience of using these or othe plastic reeds in thier regs?

I have been having problems with the cane reeds in mine and would like to get them going properly, and this seems one option. What I want to do is break myself out of a cycle on not playing the regulators because they aren’t going very well, and not fixing them because I’m not playing them …

Plastic might be a stop gap measure while I get some decent cane ones sort.

Thanks for any help.

Ian

2

I found this on the Song of the Sea website. The makers it refers to are Neil O’Grady and Bruce Childress:

“We do not have any uilleann pipes by either maker with cane drone reeds, as they have both switched to using the synthetic drone reeds, which are much easier to tune and maintain.”

“Synthetic drone reeds have the ability to play almost immediately when you take the pipes out of its case after not having played for a long time. Cane drone reeds usually would require an hour or two of adjustment in the same situation. They do not necessarily sound better than synthetic drone reeds and take much more time to get in tune.”

3

Why not metal regulator reeds? They do the job, too.

4

Do you have further information? I’m sure many of us would be interested!

5

i wonder if the metal ones take more air.

i use the plastic ones by midEast. actually not too shabby. I wanted to make cane ones because one of them had conked out on me and no matter how much adjusting i did it didn’t fix it.

I bought a new one for $3, put it in my tenor reg and it’s been working perfectly ever since. i never had problems with the other two.

6

Well I would reccomend the copper regulator reeds. They are fairly fragile though but they sound like normal reeds. By the way it’s what Seth Gallagher uses.

7

does anyone make them and offer them for sale? or am I on my own with copper or brass reeds?

8

DM Quinn makes reg reeds of phosphor bronze, as well as from spruce. So, no, you’re not alone. Joe Kennedy made me some bronze reg reeds once, and they were excellent while they lasted. But they stopped one day and refused to work again, so I have gone back to cane reg reeds.

I got an example of a styrene reg reed from Jim Daily. His method for making reeds is in An Píobaire Vol 3, No 28. I haven’t been able to find the right type of plastic yet to try making these, but Jim’s example is too bright sounding for a reg reed IMHO (Jim only made this as a test, and didn’t continue with them).

I haven’t tried the plastic reg reed plans from Song of the Sea, yet, so I don’t know anything about them.

djm

9

Are you certain it is copper and not bronze?

10

Definately bronze in gallagher regs