What is the best wire for bridle as used by Andreas Rogge.
- Tinned copper wire
- Bare copper wire
Is the best size 0.4 mm 27 swg or 0.45 mm 26 swg.
All the best
I have several pupils who have NPU practice sets on loan, all of these have wire bridles. These yokes are practically unadjustable and they are not at all a good idea in my experience.
Hello Peter
I can adjust the wire bridle on my Rogge reeds for my D, C and B chanters and regs.
If the reed lips is to open you can move the bridle down or if the reed lips is to closed just move the bridle up.
If the wire bridle is placed after the binding you can still move the bridle to open the lips but you can’t move the brildle down to close lips. To do this close the lips a wee bit you need to use fine nosed pliers and gently squeeze the front and back of bridle.
All the best
Fergus,
I’m with Pete here. They tend to warp easily and are not as subtly changeable as a trad strip of metal (copper). And the pushing of the bridle up and down hastens the end of a good reed. Look at
http://home.wxs.nl/~ejthart/Reed/reed.html for good bridle sense! 
Alan
I have the illusion maybe that I am sort of aware how to adjust a bridle, for my own reeds i would not move the bridle up or down for adjustment [the reeds have one spot they particularly fancy for the reed to sit for best performance]. On the practice chanter reeds [one particulartly is badly in need of adjusting] moving the bridle just doesn’t do the business, noises announcing iminent cracking of reed aside and they cause boundless frustration.
What kind of noises, Peter? This may be a bit silly, but could you describe those noises? 'Cos I for one don’t have a clue how to tell.
Thanks,
Mark
the sort of noises cane makes when cracking, being pushed to the limit?
The answer to Fergus’ question is … piano tuning wire, copper.
Ask the man himself and he’ll tell you the gauge.
Its a design that definitely doesn’t lend itself to frequent adjustments. If the reed and [wire] bridle end up in a place where they’re happy and tuneful, I wouldn’t touch them again. Better to have a couple of reeds than to keep adjusting a single reed.
Or just put the pipes away til the weather changes!
Don’t laugh…I know a guy in Belfast who does that.
Boyd
Piano Wire!
I can just imagine sneaking up behind the reed with it on a dark night and slllsshhh. a finished reed!!
Alan
http://www.wires.co.uk/acatalog/index.html web site is where I am going to get the bare copper wire as it is soft bare copper wire.
I measured the wire bridle on the reed and the size is 0.4 mm.
my reeds from Bruce C use wire bridles…they’re the happiest reeds I’ve got…ask him how he does it…
I had a lot of reeds die from either not being tied on securely enough, or moving the bridles up and down - or both? At any rate I’m just making the stationary copper strip type now. It’s every bit as sensitive to adjustment as shoving the things up and down, which I’d thought was the big advantage of a sliding bridle in the first place.
This copper piano wire is the winding on bass strings, right? Hobby shops have steel piano wire as well; harder than snot.
I’m thinking you want soft (to medium) copper wire, not rigid steel music wire.
There are many ways to skin a cat. Here is what works for me:
I use #24 galvanized wire for bridles, two times around the reed just above the winding. It’s a light iron(?) wire used for picture hanging. I used to use copper or brass sheet but found myself cracking reeds too often.
#24 wire is not too stiff, and I squeeze it with pliers to alter the reed opening. I do not move it up or down on the reed. Moving a bridle up & down on the reed seems to have its own set of problems, one of which is: will the bridle stay where you want it to be?
#24 wire does not have the compressive power of bent copper or brass sheet. This method assumes that the assembled reed without the bridle has a tip opening not too far from what you want. By “not too far” I suppose I mean that a reed without a bridle shouldn’t have a tip opening much more than 2 or 3 times the opening of the finished, adjusted reed. This is a bit of a guess, I’ve never tried to quantify this before.
A picture of a reed I made is at
http://www.lightlink.com/nwhitmer/reeds.html
Nick Whitmer
Looking at the side view of this reed, you can note how where the tail is formed, the sides are thicker. This should be the case just above the binding where the bridle should sit (IMO), so the reed can accept more pressure without damage. If you shove the bridle up the reed or apply tension to a wire bridle where the sides are thinner, then the cane is more prone to tearing and cracking.
Alan (If you can guess what’s in the background, you can have a free reed)
I agree with Nick. If you are using a wire bridal the reed has to be really, really close to playing without one so your adjustments are minimal.
Currently, there’s a Sloan set on eBay and the picture below was included. It looks like two wire bridals. The one midway around the scrape and the other at the top of the wrapping.
What do you guys make of that ??
I’ve double wrapped a reed with a rubberband to cure a squeak. It seemed to work fine.
AlanB:
Uh… a shrink wrapper? A set of plastic breasts? Churches? Could it be something left over from Dim Sum? Steamed rice in bananna leaves? I think I see Mr. Happy in the corner there. OOH, I know, it’s Victor Hugo’s dessicated remains!!
Mark
okay, so I’m a little bored at work
Tony,
I’m not sure if that isn’t just the light on the binding.
I have heard/seen some reeds made with a trad bridle and a wire one further up the scrape. I think that’s just an emergency procedure to make a reed speak that was made with the lips too closed. I don’t think it’s a good idea to go way up there, it alters the shape of the lips and cause the reed to beat oddly (I always imagine you’re entering the bombarde zone if you apply tension way up the lips).
I was taught to make reeds that were just a little too hard to blow w/out a bridle, so the bridle acts mostly as tensioning with a wee bit of tuning allowance. Otherwise, you cramp 'em and they break or sound crap, or you have to use the bridle to open them, and they’re a bit stiff and also prone to cracking.
Good work Mark! But not quite 
Alan
I agree with Alan. Something’s wrong with that Sloan reed picture. It
doesn’t work that way. Sliding the bridle that high would also retune
certain notes of the reed…meaning the reed wasn’t right to begin with,
or the chanter.
By way of firsthand inside experience, it would be well worth it for
someone to figure out what’s going on in the background of Alans reed
picture, even if it takes you days, or sending the picture off to NASA for
clear enlargements. I’m thinking it has to do with something Nirvana,
But then again, the glass on the table top gives a perfectly flat surface,
and what looks like fine grit sandpaper might be used to place on a flat
surface to sand the edges, or shape the tails, judging from the give-away
stage of the reed, and sawdust on the paper. 
when you get slapped with the divorecel papers you’ll be asking yourself,
'wire bridel ???"