My Irish Uilleann pipe baritone regulator prototype now has keys; the first one was a quick "git 'er done" variation on the traditional block-mounted teardrop key. Block-mounted keys are a lot more tedious to make; a proper one requires a lot of forging and filing to come up with an attractive and functional design. The flat, tongue-depressor style keys implemented for the others were developed by the Taylor brothers, Irish immigrant machinists who made Irish pipes in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century. The square horn construction lends itself to the Taylor-style keys, which are more easily made, and the wider keys are more easily operated as they are intended to be pressed by the player's wrist while fingering the chanter.
The regulator is shown mounted in the pipes for testing:
Note the piece of Honduras Mahogany under the pipes; I plan to re-saw that to make a finished regulator. One more (tenor) regulator will be made, giving what is called a "3/4" set; I haven't yet decided if I will ever make a bass regulator to make a "full set" (they are fully twice as long as a baritone, very tricky to make by traditional methods, and just as tricky to make from square construction). Some contemporary pipers have abandoned the bass regulator in favor of a 3/4 set; lighter, more compact instrument and one less reed to hassle with (a full set has 7 reeds in all to deal with :drunken_s ).
Here is a close-up; note the odd assortment of oversize springs, all I have available on hand for testing until I can get to OSH to buy the needed sizes (My car is still broken down, and we had two harware stores within reasonable bicycle distance, Yardbirds and Petaluma Ace hardware; Petaluma Hardware burned down last year, Yardbirds was assimilated by "the BORG", and neither has re-opened yet :-( )
I made plenty of mistakes on this prototype, but then that's what it's for; for example, you can see the gap where the inletting was off on one of the key mounts (that happened at least twice on this prototype). BTW, the inletting was done by hand, with an Xacto razor saw and a nice old 1/4" Buck-style socket chisel; I had never thought of MDF as something you could carve witha chisel ;-).
The big "fun" is yet to come; "the piper's despair" is the making of reeds for the instrument, one of the most frustrating and maddening types of small wood-working. "Reed Horns", as musicologists call reed instruments with expanding bores (oboes and bassons for example), usually have double-reeds, and these are the most difficult type of reeds to make and maintain. I'm using an old, worn chanter reed (these are always double-reeds), no longer viable for the two-octave range of a chanter, to test the basic functionality of the 4-note regulator, but being proportioned for a chanter cannot be put in tune for this regulator.
Because of the many quirks and difficulties of double reeds, single reed mouthpieces are occasionally provided for double-reed horns such as oboes, bassons and Sarrusophones, and the Saxophone uses single-reeds by design. Pipe organ reed horns always have single reeds (AFAIK always made of brass) and I'm going to experiment with making an organ-like single-reed attachment for the Irish regulator, which AFAIK has not been tried before.
Regards,
John
The regulator is shown mounted in the pipes for testing:
Note the piece of Honduras Mahogany under the pipes; I plan to re-saw that to make a finished regulator. One more (tenor) regulator will be made, giving what is called a "3/4" set; I haven't yet decided if I will ever make a bass regulator to make a "full set" (they are fully twice as long as a baritone, very tricky to make by traditional methods, and just as tricky to make from square construction). Some contemporary pipers have abandoned the bass regulator in favor of a 3/4 set; lighter, more compact instrument and one less reed to hassle with (a full set has 7 reeds in all to deal with :drunken_s ).
Here is a close-up; note the odd assortment of oversize springs, all I have available on hand for testing until I can get to OSH to buy the needed sizes (My car is still broken down, and we had two harware stores within reasonable bicycle distance, Yardbirds and Petaluma Ace hardware; Petaluma Hardware burned down last year, Yardbirds was assimilated by "the BORG", and neither has re-opened yet :-( )
I made plenty of mistakes on this prototype, but then that's what it's for; for example, you can see the gap where the inletting was off on one of the key mounts (that happened at least twice on this prototype). BTW, the inletting was done by hand, with an Xacto razor saw and a nice old 1/4" Buck-style socket chisel; I had never thought of MDF as something you could carve witha chisel ;-).
The big "fun" is yet to come; "the piper's despair" is the making of reeds for the instrument, one of the most frustrating and maddening types of small wood-working. "Reed Horns", as musicologists call reed instruments with expanding bores (oboes and bassons for example), usually have double-reeds, and these are the most difficult type of reeds to make and maintain. I'm using an old, worn chanter reed (these are always double-reeds), no longer viable for the two-octave range of a chanter, to test the basic functionality of the 4-note regulator, but being proportioned for a chanter cannot be put in tune for this regulator.
Because of the many quirks and difficulties of double reeds, single reed mouthpieces are occasionally provided for double-reed horns such as oboes, bassons and Sarrusophones, and the Saxophone uses single-reeds by design. Pipe organ reed horns always have single reeds (AFAIK always made of brass) and I'm going to experiment with making an organ-like single-reed attachment for the Irish regulator, which AFAIK has not been tried before.
Regards,
John
