Since recently we saw the very untimely passing of Dave Williams, who would now be the best person to reed his chanters?
Having trouble with the ghost D? 
djm
…ouch…
you could try learning to make your own. They are said to be great chanters so I’d say that means fairly easy to reed as well.?
DavidG
Mine works perfectly,wonderfuly with a Alan Burton reed.
Woops, slight grammatical error there…it should be “with a NAlan Burton reed”
My own Williams chanter is easy to reed, once Andreas Rogge made a reed for it at Willie Week one year that worked well until I broke it in a windcap incident, a year later I asked Adreas for a spare and he just checked the broken one and found a ready made reed in his box, put it in and it played perfectly. Otherwise the few reeds I’ve used in it over the years were made by Dave himself. Now I’m going to learn to make my own. I have a good working reed that’s in tune, so I’ll start by making a spare with help from the NPU DVD on reedmaking. I’d suppose that Alan Burton, Marc Coulter, Andreas Rogge, for example, would be able to make a reed without any problem.
Williams chanters don’t seem to be quirky or difficult to reed like say some D chanters by other well known modern or not so modern makers.
This of course could be due to the lack of experience in reedmaking of the piper attempting to reed a particular instrument rather than any shortcomings in any particular chanter. I doubt that an experienced reedmaker would have any problems reeding a Williams chanter. I’ve never made a chanter reed, but I’ve had no problems in adjusting the reed in my Williams when needed in order for it to play in tune.
Williams chanters don’t seem to be quirky or difficult to reed like say some D chanters by other well known modern or not so modern makers.
This of course could be due to the lack of experience in reedmaking of the piper attempting to reed a particular instrument rather than any shortcomings in any particular chanter. I doubt that an experienced reedmaker would have any problems reeding a Williams chanter. I’ve never made a chanter reed, but I’ve had no problems in adjusting the reed in my Williams when needed in order for it to play in tune.
That’s an interesting set of comments from one who admits to not having made any reeds. How would you know the differences in degree of difficulty to reed a Williams chanter compared with any other chanter for that matter?
I bring this up as I’ve probably attempted 200 reeds…and the more I learn the less I know. The good reeds I do accomplish seem to be just pure luck. I’m not sure that I understand cane enough, for example, the differences from one slip to the next and how to accomodate my reedmaking to the cane. Forget about being able to even begin to wonder about differences between chanters. I’m getting a handle on the flat vs D reeds though I failed miserably this weekend due to I think cane issues and poor judgement. How in the world did the first pipemakers and reedmakers ever get it right? Do you think the reeds, or at least the notion of how to make them, came first? That the pipes were built around the reeds?
Lewis, I agree with you that there is an element of either dumb luck…or as I was tossing yet another cracked set of cane lips into the bin at 12:15am…I speculated that perhaps the ‘reedmaking wee-people’ occasionally visit to help out. There were absent last night!
On a more scientific note, I was thinking of paying more attention to the starting diameter of the cane tube. This affects the ultimate curve of the lips, and the diameter of the sanding tube you need to get the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 ratios of the lips to the space in between.
However that being said the curvature of the cane varies even within the same tube of cane of a given diameter…does anyone select a slip based on the cane’s radius at any given spot on the tube?
Or does none of this matter and there are so many variables that you just have to make 10 (or more) reeds to get one good one? Therefore, the best approach is to increase your speed of production to crank out 10 as quickly as possible and eliminate the ‘bad reeds’…