Hi. I am new to Uilleann piping. So be easy on me! This might be a silly question..
In our backyard garden we have tulips growing. At the near-end of spring when the snow has all melted, the remaining stems of the tulips have that reed look. Hard Bark on the outside, and a soft pith in the middle. But it has gotten quite rotten and fragile due to all the snow and stuff.
But I am wondering if it is able to be harvested fresh to dry out, and be used as drone reeds? It looks like it has a desirable size to it.
The only stupid questions are the one’s you don’t ask, and the one’s having to do with spoon playing technique.
I think you would find that the wall thickness was a bit thin, and the resiliance of the material would make for a soft-sounding, unstable reed.
But, there’s no reason not to give it a go.
Nothing silly about it at all. Some plants beside cane are used to make drone reeds. Elder, lilac, snowberry and forsythia are ones I have used. It seems like tulip may not have the woody wall necessary, as the tongue needs some strength in the wall in order to be flexed. Raspberry has been suggested, but I have not tried it. I want to try syringa, which does not grow where I live. You never know until you try. Goose feather shafts have been used in the past. Lots of combinations of plastics, metal and wood are put together to make composite reeds by a number of makers today, with varying degrees of success.
We do have raspberries growing in our backyard, so I could use that.
I may in the past have mentioned the raspberry canes here in passing, probably after cleaning up the raspberry beds before the winter. I don’t think they’re really woody enough, although they’d come closer than any tulip I have ever seen.
As for the above post, let’s say, here’s the t-shirt:
Elder is all over the place here in Oregon. And it makes a beautiful drone reed, as well as a fantastically subtle chanter reed. People have been experimenting with all sorts of reeding sourcing for years. Weird stuff, too. Why not expand the palette of what’s been tried and what works or doesn’t work…
Elder makes excellent chanter reeds, if you can find a section of branch large enough. I remember that Brendan Ring was making them, and he brought a large piece of elder to the Saint Chartier Festival which he was going to carve into separate blades. At the time I was using an elder reed made by Chris Bayley and it played superbly in zero humidity and 100 degrees heat.
But on to drone reeds…
The problem with getting elder is that you can only really cut it when the sap hasn’t started rising, as the sap interferes with the drying process. Seasoning the cuttings is simple though; cut the tube a little longer than you need, remove the pith, and then push a piece of brass rod through the tube to keep it as straight as possible. Then set it aside for a year or so.
It is very cold here in the UK at the moment, so I will now go and cut some elder from the bushes in my garden.
Thank you Mike for the tip about the brass rod. I recall seeing some pictures of elder cane drone reeds by R. L. Mealy that were as twisted as old style ‘twist’ cheroots. . . .
You can make elder drone reeds from bent pieces of the stuff, as you don’t lift the tongue by splitting it upwards as with Arundo, You cut into it with a scalpel to form the tongue, but if your material is bent you must cut the tongue on the CONVEX side.
Has Bamboo ever been used for drone or chanter reeds?
Yes - an NSP maker used it for his drone reeds. It was drilled it out to get the walls thin and then split like a cane reed but they were not very good requiring a lot of pressure. Small diameter cane has always been quite hard to get in my experience so makers looked at elder shoots and metal reeds as alternatives.
As Mike says you have to cut the tongue for elder and this is done by going quite deep into the tube at an angle and then slanting the cut upwards so that at the root end of the tongue it is thinner. The tongue will also need weighting with a blob of wax
Bamboo and cane are both giant grasses. A friend of mine makes bamboo reeds for Bulgarian bagpipes from bamboo that he gets from the handles of Chinese caligraphy brushes. The tongue is carved very thin for its’ whole length. The pressure is normal but the tone is very bright.
A Hungarian piper I know has made composite reeds for years for his pipes. He has made bodies from various woods, ivory and plastics. He also uses cane tongues and puts a slight (1 1/2 degree) slope on the tip of the body, rather than bending the tongue upward, to make them work. He said bakelite gave a tone closest to an all cane reed.
Of course Bakelite is more rare than cane these days, though I guess you could carve up or melt down some old radio bodies. I actually have an old electric guitar that has the entire body and neck cast in Bakelite. Might even be possible to brew your own batch of new Bakelite from phenol and formaldehyde!
, winters are long here in Alberta. And I haven’t bothered to look into that.
