The biggest issue with my latest reed (and most of my reeds) is the back D. With too light pressure, it plays a D, but with a little more pressure it plays as a d#. The “too light pressure” is much lighter than I need to play for the rest of the notes, so usually it comes out as a D#. Should I be shooting for the D or the D#?
Some of my reeds will play the back D as three tones. This one does not break or gurgle. I have tried narrower heads and wider heads.
Reed has good tone, good crow. Second octave is a little flat. The g’s are sharp. Good hard d. It will play up to the third D. High B is a little sharp.
It sounds to me like you are making the reed head to short, this would cause this double toning effect you are experiencing.
What length is your slip to start with? and what length are the tails?
Slip is 4 1/2" to start. Tails are 1 1/4". Length of tails overlapping staple: 15/16". Staple eye is 1.62mm, staple slope to the eye distance is approx 7/8".
…sometimes I’ve run into (or worse, created myself) over-scraped reeds that produced the 3-D anomaly. Scrapping the reed and starting over was always best in that instance.
I will be scrapping every reed then. I only scrape enough to get the pitch down. Should I be sanding more with the cylinder to thin the slips initially? I’m generally following BK’s suggestion for the dip dimension.
Dip and Stature have to corroborate (at some level) as the stature can have an operable range. What is not covered in BKs part of the DVD (in detail) is the thickness of the tails. Hey, he couldn’t cover everything!
So, if you go thinning the tails to keep them from cracking, you significantly affect the aperture. If you go thin that’s grand… but then everything must change to accommodate that move.
If you’re forcing the reed shut, that too can bear on the performance, and may cause weirdness (like what you’re having with the D).
If you’re wrapping tight, if you’re wrapping beyond the staple, if you’ve not scraped enough (you can have the pitch where you want it and still not have scraped enough). There are so many, or even too many variables to cover on C&F…
As you make more and more reeds, and run into problems that make you want to go mad and commit heinous acts of aggression on inanimate objects , you will start to develop a global sense about what you are doing, and how everything you do, has bearing upon everything else…and just HOW so, too! That is the the real trick of reed making, which comes wayyyyyy after the method! Mind you, I’m not talking down to you. I’m merely detailing my own journey here, which as I understand…is one every reed maker follows, forever!
Steve, w/some aberrations it’s easy to suggest remedies. This isn’t one of them, unfortunately.
Oops, I realize I wrote something incorrectly: too little pressure gives me the sharp back D, and regular D requires too much pressure, not the other way around. I apologize to those of you who tried to follow my incorrect explanation.
I realize that all aspects of the reed are inter-related. Just looking for a little direction from the gurus here. Especially since most of my reeds tend to have the same problem lately.
One thing for sure: I am wrapping beyond the staple usually to get the sides to close. After a day or two I usually unwrap the reed and rewrap it, keeping the wrapping lower.
And I didn’t think you were talking down to me. More like talking me down, which is a good thing.
Make sure there are no leaks. Push the back D hard for a few days to see if the pitch begins to flatten. Inspect the lips utilizing both visual and tactile methods to identify the weakest corner and avoid thinning that corner. Work the other corners down slowly, striving for balance and symmetry. Play the back D at the harder pressure between thinning. Sometimes the discrepancy between the two back D tones can gradually lessen until the two tones converge at the desired pressure. Trim lips as needed.
Dittos…check along the edges for leaks. Leaks can be anywhere, even through the winding or the seam of a rolled staple. Check to make sure the lips are fully closing, evenly, when checking the crow. The crow should be easy and effortless and should sound before you hear air passing through. If you inhale strong enough, the crow stops and the whole reed should feel like it’s collapsing–kinda like covering the hose of a vaccum cleaner and the engine speeds up for lack of air.
Your reed looks nice from the outside. Did you leave a tone chamber? Most reeds I’ve gotten have more cane showing between the lips and the end of the winding, and more space between the V and the winding. That may not be necessary though. Good luck!
Ah, that makes more sense. I suspected that might be the case.
In my experience the BK chanter/reed design does play a sharp back D when under-powered, which sinks abruptly to the correct pitch under pressure. My own does the same. (I should say, rather, that I find this to be true with my own reeds in Koehler chanters, and in my own reed/chanter design - I can’t recall offhand if Benedict’s finished reeds exhibit this behavior in K/Q chanters or not, but I suspect they do, if you back off on pressure excessively). Thus for your chanter I expect the ultra-sharp back D when under-powered may be normal, what is not normal is the fact that the resulting pressure is too much for the C#, second octave E, etc.
I hate to be contrarian, but perhaps the reeds are _under_scraped rather than overscraped. In my own reedmaking experience, thinning the reed further brings down the plateau for the back D into the right range for the neighboring notes. Usually the bottom D is better once this is fixed, as well. It could also flatten the first octave a bit more than the second, thus improving your octave alignment.
If the reeds are turning out stiff, try the same dip/elevation but with thinner slip edges. This requires greater precision in reedmaking but it can yield great benefits. For what it’s worth, your staple seems a bit longer and reed head scrape looks a little short compared to Benedict’s - what’s your scrape length?
I don’t know whether this might help, but I find that the narrower measurement on the staple blank has a big effect on back D response and tuning. It tends to go hand in hand with the reed head width. With tubing staples, it’s difficult to control the size/shape of the eye, as the narrowness of the eye affects the width too. To get the correct ‘folding’ of the reed head when you tie it up, the reedhead can’t be too narrow as it either doesn’t fold over the staple side or it imparts too much curvature/tension up the head and your reed then needs too much closure or it just cracks, or if the tail taper/shoulder is too narrow you get a stiff raucous reed. I think this is why people sometimes make really widereed heads (over 13mm), so they can easily tie on the reed (despite the pitfalls therein).
So, with rolled staples you have a slight cone for your area that you’re going to taper that is also narrower than a tube staple, the resulting taper is narrower, and in general the eye shape is different. The tails need to be made a little narrower to accomodate this, and in turn the cane slip needs to be narrower to avoid a ‘bottleneck’ of tension when tying on.
An e.g. is my chanter, which is an O’Briain. It’s modelled to work with Cillian’s reed design, which is tube staple. Using the ‘normal’ Benedict staple measurements I had a bad toned D that was flat (and other anomalies, but gorgeous tone), when I brought the narrow end to 14.2, I achieved a much truer tuned D, but all in all I, unfortunately, can’t really get a totally satisfactory rolled staple in my chanter, unless I practically roll a cylinder
Try dropping the width of your reed head to 12.2/12.3 (before tying and scraping)? (and the longer head).
Bill,
My BK reed does go sharp when underpowered, although to a much lesser extent.
The scrape length is 7/8". It’s much shorter than the scrape on BK’s reed for my chanter, but one reason is because I was having no luck with that long of a scrape, so I decided to try a wider blade and shorter scrape.
Perhaps my reeds are too stiff in that I feel like I am scraping more and more to get the pitch down.
As an experiment, I disassembled the reed, thinned the tails and trimmed the shoulders in an effort to have it close up sooner as I wrapped it, leaving more of the blades exposed, since a number of comments seemed to be leading this direction. The D issue is slightly improved: less of a two-tone pitch, but still some variability. This seems like it’s going in the right direction. I haven’t tried thinner slip edges yet.
Thank you all for the ideas and suggestions. I’m reinvigorated to make some more reeds now. I will keep these suggestions in mind as I continue along the path to reedmaking nirvana (or reedmaking hell, whichever the case may be).
, you will start to develop a global sense about what you are doing, and how everything you do, has bearing upon everything else…and just HOW so, too! That is the the real trick of reed making, which comes wayyyyyy after the method! Mind you, I’m not talking down to you. I’m merely detailing my own journey here, which as I understand…is one every reed maker follows, forever!
