does any call for the reed blade to be cut facing the instrument instead of the wind?
Sorry, not sure what you mean.
not that I’ve ever seen
be kinda like turning a fipple inside out wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t that be similar to ‘crowing’ (?) a reed? Like when pipers suck in on a reed to test it.
that should about cover the possible meanings!
I was goin’ with the outside of the cane to the inside of the mouthpiece
partly ‘cause I couldn’t deal with puttin’ in on backwards like
michael mac harg told me that some bass drones
will play only with inverted cut reeds.
drone reeds made in spain for my gaita were cut inverted style.
like these: http://www.thebagpipeplace.com/school/page28.html
thanks, i have fooled around with this and like the results.
it also is equivalent to shortening the bore length a bit.
i have a hornpipe i made years ago and i made the reed like that, inverted.
it is a strange thing as i had never heard of a hornpipe except for the music and those i asked said it wasn’t an instrument that existed, so i made one and for along time i had the “only one”, then along came the internet.
it plays in F and is in tune, made from elder and cow horn, arundo reed, i even used the same traditional materials without knowing.
something to be said for collective consciousness
So is that what you meant, tansy? Internal reeds only, not mouth-blown?
sorry, i don’t use a mouth piece, i put the single reed in my mouth with lips on the hornpipe, cow horn on other end.
OK, understood. You’re playing it as if it had a lip plate.
Jemtheflute here makes his own reeds for his Welsh hornpipe (pibgorn). Wonder which design he uses?
I bet he’s an “outer”
Yep, “normal”, tongue’s free end pointing up/out. Actually, the way the reed socket is set up on my pibgorn you couldn’t really use an inverted reed, though I might have a go at making one just for the hell of it now the idea’s been brought to mind (I was already vaguely aware that some drone reeds can be set this way). However, I suspect that having an in/down pointing free end of the tongue will require it to finish outside the (quite deep) socket and that will cause tuning problems… even worse than I already have. Might just be a magic answer, though. Apart from the tuning issue, it won’t affect the vibration function of the reed - a pibgorn is in effect a wind-cap instrument and ones’ mouth has no contact with the reed.
BTW, new 1-year-on pibgorn video clip up on YouTube today, by coincidence!
i have found bridal adjustment is extremely critical. when it was playing right i marked it with a razor blade shallow cut and it never varies more than 3 razor blade cut thicknesses. it takes the reed some time to break in but last a long time, still playing great after some years.
the thumb note is the one to watch for, if it is right the rest of it is right, on mine.
tansy
Aye. They can be awkward b****s, can’t they? 
Never did get mine adjusted properly, then she “readjusted” me! Terminally.
FWIW and being more sensible, I agree one doesn’t have to move the bridle very much to have a big effect, ditto the thread under the tongue. My problem note tends to be the bottom one which can drop alarmingly when all else is working well, or be sharp when …
Love the Welsh Orchestra music. I’ve never seen so many hearts assembled in one place before. Also, the Welsh language was so unusually beautiful to here spoken. It must be a very old language. The pibgorn reminded a bit of the crummhorn. But I like the pibhorn better. It almost reminded me of a bagpipe sound. You seemed to be doing rolls and other ornamentations.
Thanks! And thanks for looking. Re the Clerorfa clip, you meant “harps”, I guess, not “hearts”?
Modern Welsh is a modern language with ancient antecedents just like any other tongue. The Welsh are given to claiming it as “the oldest language in Europe” - wrongly - that is unarguably (by serious authorities on linguistic history) Basque/Euskeria. Welsh/Cymraeg is the longest still living language in Britain with direct descent and and unbroken development, yes, but is nearly as different from the Brythonic dialects spoken after the Romans left as modern English is from the Anglo-Saxon that arrived here at about that time.
As for the pibgorn, yes it is not dissimilar to crumhorns, kortholts and other similar mediaeval/renaissance wind-cap woodwinds, though maybe a bit louder and more open-throated in sound than those tend to be. There is no continuous playing tradition, so we do not know what style of playing would have been used, but the range limited to one octave and the wind pressure required make bagpipe type articulation and ornamentation as well as tune arrangement seem likely/natural, though one can tongue or simply stop or start blowing too.
Actually, serious authorities on linguistic history are happy to argue about anything. 
One conventional view is that Basque is a survival of a Pre-Indo-European neolithic substrate language. Another (Paleolithic Continuity Theory) posits that it developed alongside Indo-European in the Iberian glacial refuge during the Younger Dryas glaciation. Which would make it co-eval. Recent genetics suggest strong haplogroup affinity between Britain/Ireland and Iberia and all along Atlantic Europe. Uralic Continuity makes a good case that the roots of Finnish and Estonian in Europe are at least as deep.
I kind of like the 1) Atlantis refugees 2) lost tribe of Israel 3) pre-Babel language of Eden 4) extraterrestrial theories myself.
Sorry, back now to your horny pipes.
Thanks! And thanks for looking. Re the Clerorfa clip, you meant “harps”, I guess, not “hearts”?
Yes meant the harps. The harp is the most soothing instrument to listen to I think.
Well, yes, sure. Now, of whom does that remind me? 
As for the rest of your post. MTGuru, yes, I read Colin Renfrew’s book on linguistic Archaeology and more recently that thing about post-glacial gene distribution and migration, and various other stuff… all fascinating and with, as always in academia, shifting theorisation and debunking of older orthodoxies (kinky!) etc. etc. fair enough. I always think that thing about “it is a very ancient language” is a nonsense in the sense in which it is usually intended. Caesar’s Latin, the Sanskrit of the Vedas, Classical Greek and so on are ancient (and dead) languages. Old English, Old Welsh, Middle English and Middle Welsh are old languages, and our current forms are descended from them and we might, if we had time travel, be able at least partially to communicate with our ancestors who spoke those earlier versions more easily than we could with someone modern or historic who spoke a different language entirely. Welsh has probably changed less than English and (allowing for possible differences of accent) a modern Welsh speaker would “get” more of say, Aneurin or Dafydd ap Gwilym than a modern English speaker would of the Beowulf poet, or even of Chaucer. Yes, the ancestral forms of Welsh have been in Britain much longer than the equivalent roots of English, but it is still a false argument and unfortunately one oft repeated and commonly heard from the less-than-well-informed and misguidedly nationalistic to say modern Welsh is “older” than English (which has equally old traceable roots, just not in Britain) or anything else.
Ah, excellent, Jem. Yes, Renfrew’s Anatolian neolithic diffusion theory is interesting, and a step forward from the Kurgan orthodoxy that reigned when I was at uni. As a linguist, I was always seriously bothered by the implied shallow time depth of IE development, and Renfrew and/or PCT seem much more plausible to me.
And I agree completely about language ages; your comments are spot-on.