Burger King and Dairy Queen?
One Whopper, Peanut Buster Parfait, uhh…hold the sinking back D…
I don’t think there’s anything especially magical about how old reeds were put together, other than the fact that if they still work they were made well. Mostly it’s just dimensional things like the head width, thickness of metal used - aren’t many old Taylor reeds fitted with brass staples? And they liked to solder the seam shut. And they used elder in the drones. Things like that may get you as close as you can to the original sound and playability, but copper or cane drone reeds certainly can work well too. A general size of staple/width of head should give you a shot with a chanter, you could muck about with the scrape on your own. Salt to taste, as they say.
This business with wide staple eyes is my eye opener revelation of the year, I want to try that on my old concert chanter and see if it doesn’t help here and there.
Dan O’Dowd always scraped the cane BEFORE folding the slip in half, which may have been the common way of making reeds in the old days - I should check Busby and O’Meally’s reedmaking tips and see if they worked that way, too. That’s how oboe reeds are put together, innit? Gotta look into that, too…
