Over the last few years I have been giving Terry Ackland feedback about prototype drone reeds he has been making. We settled on a design for 440 drone reeds and have since shortened those reeds to play at 466 Hz / Bb and 480 Hz. So you’ve heard the 440 reeds and also the Bb reeds before if you’ve dug into some of the more recent posts on the blog (not that I’ve been active much lately). I’ve raved about the reeds so figured I better put my money where my mouth is and record the 480 reeds, having just put them in my Gellaitry pipes yesterday. This is significant because while I’ve played, but not really recorded the 480 reeds in all my other pipes, my Gellaitry’s are my solo set, my rock, my sound. And I really like the results with the Overtone (Ackland) reeds! I find them bold and harmonic, but in that they are easy to tune. Sometimes reeds with prominent harmonics are hard to tune because it’s hard to lock in the harmonics even though the beat frequency seems absent. This is not the case with Ackland Overtone reeds.

Here they are with the mic on the drone side (so the audio is a bit drone heavy).

Here they are with the mic on the chanter side:

Here’s me walking around (this is the very first set of this recorded series):

Here are some small strathspeys, reel, and a hornreel or reelpipe:

Here are some MSRs: