In his interview with Bill Haneman David Quinn reveals that, although he is well known for his extensive studies of Taylor pipes, he doesn’t especially care for their sound and prefers the “Rowesome Sound”. So, my question is: What are the distinguishing features of the “Taylor Sound” ? Also, are there any recent recordings of Taylor pipes (i.e. those with a proper Taylor bore)? The only one I know of is an NPU video of Sean Mac Ciarnan paying the Touhey pipes but there is only about 2 or 3 minutes playing on it.
Willie Clancy plays a Taylor set on 4 tracks on the NPU’s Drones and Chanters vol 1.
Also, on Pat D’Arcy’s website there’s an interview with Joe Shannon in which he plays the “Beatty” Taylor set. Here’s the link (you’ll have to scroll down about 3/4 of the page or else do a search for Shannon):
Look for the CD “Handed On” by Eoin O’Riabhaigh. He plays his Taylor set on at least some of the tunes.
Eoin plays Froment chanter on that recording methinks.
Listening to Sean McKiernan play that chanter I was amazed at, even through the lens of all the years and really old/scratchy recordings, just how much that chanter still sounds like it did in Touhey’s hands.
…I confess to agreeing with His Rt. Hon Rev. Quinn on this one.
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If you had to boil it down to words, I guess my main beef with the Taylor Sound is that it lacks soul.
I find it kind of one-dimensional and dull. A good player can make it sound expressive of course, but the tone just seems uninteresting and lacking in the richness and complexity of the Rowsome chanters.
Eoin plays the original chanter on the Piper’s Rock LP. A bad mic can make anything sound awful, I’ve a recording of Eoin and his Da from 1974 that really grates on the ears, nothing like the sound of the Taylor set.
I love the sound of Joe Shannon’s drones. Compare that to O’Flynn etc.
ah, the Taylor drones are a different matter; it’s the sound of the chanter that I dislike.
There’s a clip of Sean McKiernan playing his Taylor set somewhere on YouTube. IIRC it was part of a program broadcast by RTE about Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh.
There’s also a YouTube clip of Joe Shannon on his Taylor set.
Taylor regulators = Car horns. 
Listen to Patsy Touhy vamping it up on Miss McLeod. It’s not just the microphone placement that makes the regs louder than the rest of the set!
Taylor chanters aren’t bad, it’s just that the Rowsomes came up with something a bit better tonally, something that was as loud as a Taylor but had more sweetness and a broader tonal palette. You do have to look at the reed + chanter combination as an entire system, it’s not enough to just measure bores and compare. If you compare a Taylor Brothers reed to a Leo Rowsome reed, their approaches to reedmaking could hardly be more different.
Taylor drones are really good, though. In person they’re very rich and pleasantly buzzy without overpowering the chanter or vice versa.
A lot of that tone comes from the piper himself, though. Joe played pretty strictly on-the-knee ala Touhey and Ennis, compare that to the sound Clancy got out of a Taylor chanter.
With these Irish PA systems to me it’s just degrees of unlistenability though. 
Even my medium-small holed Patsy Brown chanter with rush in the bore is quite the squawk monster compared to my narrow D sticks.
How about Crowley (Crowley-style) pipes—I don’t often hear much about those.
I never played my Taylor chanter for more than 10 minutes during the whole time I owned it. So, after 15 years of it sitting in a box, I sent it up to DMQ for his amusement. He later remarked, “I got no joy out of it.”
I don’t know what the Taylor sound is. I have seen and heard probably 10-15 Taylor sets and they all sounded different and awful; Joe Shannon’s, Willie Clancy, Gene Frain, to name a few.. It seems to me that Taylor sold his experiments. The most interesting thing about the Taylor sets was the key work.
All of these sets were full of rushes and wire.
If I had to describe the sound that I have heard it would be the rough sound of car horns and the lonely sound of the triangle; about as interesting as a flute with a tuba.
Pat Sky
As with all pipes, set-up is everythng. I recently had the opportunity to examine a Taylor set in detail, and immediately noticed that the remaining (original?) regulator reeds were very, very small. This would undoubtedly affect the volume of the regulators, as well as the tone. The demands of modern musicians are far different from those of Patsy Touhey’s day, where he had to fill a concert hall without the benefit of a PA system, so I think his set-up would have been optimised for volume and carrying power.
Isn’t there a soundclip of the Balderose Taylor set around somewhere? I seem to remember that this set sounded very good.
I believe it was you, Pat, who once described the sound of pipes as “a bandsaw going through a duck”.
I don’t think either phrase would describe this Taylor set:
http://billhaneman.ie/soundfiles/AnBonnanBui.mp3
It had no wires etc. and the only rush in the regs was a single 3" length of straight river rush in the tenor (no blu-tack or wax, even!) It was unusual also in that all the reeds in chanter and regs were originally made (by me) for Coyne B chanters/baritone regulators. That means reed heads of under 11 mm and staples of about 3.4 mm I.D. (even the bass regulator reed!).
Excuse the regulator playing, I’m not fully licensed to play them unaccompanied. 
I agree with Mike, it’s probably not safe to assume that these things (in general) are in original condition, or are set up the way the maker intended. It’s also possible that this set is/was highly atypical of Taylor. Since none of the Taylors’ work appears to be stamped, the attribution is on the basis of the mechanical and decorative features, which are very consistent with Taylors of known providence (at least to the extent of my own knowledge). Someone else might differ and say that it is the work of an exceptionally skilled imitator, since the bores are so different from what one expects of a Taylor chanter nowadays… but maybe our expectations need adjusting!
I have more sound samples of this set but am waiting to get permission from the players on my ‘NBD Taylor clip mp3’ before uploading it. It was a joy and an honor to play it.
There goes my bandwidth!
- Bill
Those are lovely sounds posted by Bill. However, to be fair to the Taylor “detractors”, I was referring to the wide-bore “concert” sets rather than the narrow bore. And I can identify with the tales of blue tack and wire, having had several desperate attempts to get a Tayloresque chanter in tune with itself at modern concert pitch. Perhaps the A440 target was part of the problem? The chanter can be reeded satisfactorily down to about A444 but at A440 it sounds a bit raw. Overall, the sound of the chanter doesn’t really inspire me to pick it up in preference to others.
In 1998 Tommy McCarthy was over for the Dutch Tionol and he did bring his Taylor chanter.
He was so kind to let me (and others) try it out and I was surprised how softly it was more like a flat chanter than concert pitch.
His Rowsome was twice as loud. There was a very small reed in it not at all what you would expect in a concert pitch chanter.
This was my first encounter with a Taylor before that I thought Taylors where like ‘car horns’, not from experience but hear say or something I read on a internet… The lesson for me was never believe anything you read on the internet before you’ve tried it out yourself…
Evertjan
This might be true but it doesn’t mean always that the chanter is to blame. I had a Williams chanter send to me to reed and there was tape on every hole and a few guitar strings in the bore to get it down to 440. The reed was a mismatch and after fitting the chanter with a reed that was a match with the bore it was in tune, without tape or rushes. So be careful to discard a chanter as rubbish. Not that I really care for the Taylor sound but that’s an other story.
Evertjan
For those still interested, I’ve posted a
new soundfile of the Taylor, played by many different people, to my site. It’s big - 15 MB, don’t say I didn’t warn you
Bear in mind that most of the people recorded were playing the set for the very first time, and in some cases the recording captures the first notes they played. Thus not everyone has settled in to the set, there are glitches… but the clip is interesting to me for several reasons. For one thing, the set sounds great and everyone manages to show off something different about it. It’s also interesting to hear great players sounding “like themselves” while playing the same set, with the same reeds.
The clip features the playing of (in order):
Ronan Browne (playing before the reeds were balanced, so bass drone cuts out)
Cormac Cannon
Cormac with Breda Keville
Benedict Koehler
Mick O’Brien
Gay McKeon
Darragh O’Heiligh (oops, didn’t ask Darragh yet 
)
Leo Rickard
Emmett Gill
(and a last few seconds of yours truly saying farewell to the set with some friends.)
enjoy (and if you listen more than once, please download to save my bandwidth!)
Bill
p.s. - I’m mostly off-the-air for the holidays, now
Oh, that set. Does anybody work those 3rd octave keys? Lovely chanter, I got to take a close look at it when the owner needed a reed, but missed the chance to actually play it.