“I
T was 1988 when I fi rst saw the Canmore pipe bag at a competition in Northern Ire-
land. Up until that time, I’d only ever seen or used sheepskin and cane. When I came to Australia to play with Victoria Police, I changed to a Ross bag and the original synthetic Ross reeds with cane tongues. The nature of the weather and the variance in high temperature and low humidity here makes it very hard for a band to develop a sheepskin and cane sound with confi dence in its stability. If you play sheepskin, cane would always be my fi rst choice of system for a piper. With pipe bands, history has proven this natural material provides the best range of harmonics and tone. It can, however, be just too hard for a novice piper or a lower grade band to keep a full sheepskin and cane system going. Add into this the variances of temperature and humidity that you get across the world of pipe bands and you begin to
see to reasoning behind the development of equipment to make the instrument more stable, more controllable. When I was beginning in pipe bands, it wasn’t uncommon to see a couple, if not more pipers of a band, not getting their pipes up for the ‘E’, and then pipers beginning to lose tone towards the end of their performance. These days it’s rare to see pipers not getting started or stopped in any grade. Lower grade bands the world over are developing a very good sound, very good technique, and a lot of this is due to the stability and ease of synthetic systems and moisture control. Looking at the development of
Moisture Control Systems (MCS), the mistake often made by people is under- standing why they were developed, not the result that they have on your sound. In the past, and even now, with sheep- skin and cane, the instrument needs to be ‘nursed along’. Play it too much or too little, you have trouble. This was certain failure for those who couldn’t
PIPING TODAY • 41
SYNTHETICS
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