My first brand new wood pipe purchase finally arrived in the mail today. The wait was about 4.5 months from order to ship. Then they spent another month in the mail between Bulgaria and Lubbock. The are a set of Doug MacPherson‘s pipes of african blackwood with boxwood ferrules, ringcaps, and bushes with blackwood rounded projecting mounts; the whole set is plain turned. The chanter also has a boxwood sole. These drones sound big! A clip of me trying to get a good drone recording is here:

MacPherson with Crozier Glass drone reeds

The chanter is also quite good and on the flatter side from where I’m used to playing. It came in around 475-6 Hz. The high G is a little sharp in the recording below (hence the tape that was added later before the pictures below were taken) and the low A a little sharp as well, but with a reed with 2 corners missing, there’s just not a whole lot to judge except the idiot playing a reed with 2 corners missing. This recording is with the MacPherson chanter with said Gilmour reed, with only tape on the low A to bring it down a little, so the recording is quite accurate as regards to the natural tuning of the MacPherson chanter without being muddled with a lot of tinkering. Which I think says a lot because it’s all very close. Note, the small Gannaway bag was a little leaky when these recordings were made (it is now draining Gannaway seasoning in the bath tub). Some reels I’m fooling around with: Sleepy Maggie ‘backwards’ from Scots Guards, Dancing Feet in G inspired by Seudan followed by Dancing Feet a la regulare. Kinda of a build up thingie madoodle: E, F, G, A.

Sleepy Maggie x2 + Dancing Feet x2

I’m not doing what I should be doing, which is packing for our 4 week trip to Houston. Instead I took a few minutes to edit some audio I was up last night recording (again, instead of packing; my poor wife). A student of mine has restarted lessons after a hiatus and brought his Colin Kyo bagpipes back to me to set up for him. Well, I knew I wasn’t going to have much time with them so I recorded as much as I could. I tried 9 sets of drone reeds in them (sans chanter) and did a couple tunes too. For the drone sounds we have in order:

Crozier glass, Kinnaird, Henderson Harmonic Deluxe, older Selbie, Crozier carbon, Redwood, Ezeedrone, Colin Kyo, and Canning

The recording conditions were all the same but there were still some unavoidable volume differences due to slight changes in standing position between switching out drone reeds.

I’ve stated in the past that I didn’t think Crozier’s classification of their glass tongued reeds as mellow, as they certainly aren’t ‘soft’, but they are mellow compared to quite a few other reeds. The tenors don’t put off a whole lot of overtones so you get a more blended sound. So, if you’ve got Henderson’s and you don’t want to lose the volume but you want a more MacDougallish sound, Crozier glass are what you are looking for. As such, the recording below with tunes is with the Crozier glass. Chanter is a blackwood one with a Gilmour reed.

Swallow Tailed Coat, Swallow’s Tail, Gravel Walk, Dick Gossip’s, Cape Breton Fiddlers’ Farewell to Shetland, Susan MacLeod, Miss Proud, Bessie McIntyre

I found the Colin Kyo bagpipes very nice and had what I consider a classic Henderson tone. Very steady and I wish I had one!