SYNTHETICS
arm and then check the blowpipe position. The blowpipe may be the incorrect length for your height… a myriad of things may be wrong. Get the set-up right! If you develop poor posture due to an incorrect set-up, you will end up in pain and this will affect your playing. Have your tutor or another experienced piper help you to fit a bag to your posture. If you have an opportunity to try different brands of bags that fellow pipers are using, then this will give you the best scope of finding what your looking for. With sheepskin you can, of course, get the bag tied-in to suit your posture perfectly. When Nigel Hylands and I designed the
Moose Bag, we aimed to get an average fit. A shaped bag for comfort under the arm, good angles for the drones, and very importantly, an acute, comfortable blowpipe angle. Impor- tantly, I would never advise using a universal joint blowpipe unless absolutely required. Try to avoid promoting poor posture or using devices to correct bad posture, especially for children and beginners. If you look around the top pipe bands, it’s rare to see these in use. These pipers will generally all have perfectly-fitting instruments and good erect posture. It’s usually due to the bagpipe not being set up to suit the piper. A comfortable piper is a relaxed piper, and a relaxed piper is free to concentrate on playing the music. Selecting reeds for your drones and setting up
your chanter is one of the most personal things a piper will do with his or her pipe. The combi- nations are extensive, however, once you’ve got your bagpipe set up, you’re ready to move on to developing the stability of your instrument. A chanter that sounds vibrant and full, but won’t last 10 minutes of tuning and playing is worth- less. Drones that can’t handle much more than a warm-up or become unstable after the ground of a 12-minute piobaireachd will continue to disappoint throughout an entire performance. When I first started with Vic Police in the
1980s we used the Ross moisture control sys- tem. We used this wholly for stability and a consistency in sound. The weather in Australia, and in particular Melbourne, could change dra- matically over the course of a competition day. Synthetic drone reeds love dry air, so as soon as condensation hits the tongue of the drone reed, things start to change. Everything slows down. The blades vibrate at a different rate, a different frequency — instability. I explain to my students that getting moisture or condensa- tion on the blade of a drone reed is like running
‘The chanter tube provides a considerable amount of protection to the chanter reed. Keeping the hot moist air from directly flowing on to chanter reed is important’
down the beach and then suddenly hitting the water. The weight of the condensation on the tongue changes how it vibrates. If you can es- tablish a practice of having the drone sections of your canister as dry as possible throughout the performance, your drones are greatly assisted in staying stable. By the mid 1990s some of us in Vic Police were making our own modified tubes to fit our canisters. Some of the guys even taped on their canister to ensure a complete airtight system that couldn’t leak moist air into the drones in any way.”
IN ATTEMPTING to understand the role of the MCS, Ian believes it must be considered part of the drone not part of the bag set-up. Ian is committed to a well set-up and prepared bagpipe. Poor hemping and poor maintenance should never be an excuse for poor sound. Basic maintenance and care of the bagpipe is critical. “So much of the bagpipe is about control.
If you can control your pipe and make it do what you want it to do, why wouldn’t you? Robbing consistent pressure from leaks will compromise your performance, so will leaks within the tubes of your MCS. Keeping the air dry to your reeds means stability, so if you have leaks within the tubes your drones will be getting different air quality to each of the reeds. Result: unstable drones. Often, damage is caused to the tubes from the canister to the drone stocks by improper storage, especially in a pipe case that is not designed to store a pipe with a MCS. Almost 100 per cent of tube failures are due to incorrect stowage in pipe cases. There are two cases spe- cifically designed to cater for this. The Bagpiper Case and the R.G. Hardie Piper Case are two of the best for pipes with an MCS. Over the past few years I’ve seen some very strange things done with chanter tubes. There are bands and senior pipers all over the world ripping out chanter tubes from the system in an attempt to get better projection, better sound.
Yes, this is obviously the case if you take away the slight restriction to a chanter reed of an already existing reed that was chosen to suit that system, but it’s more than often no good for the individual who has just had their means of moisture control ejected from their bagpipes. Victoria Police in the 90s were recognised as having one of the best pipe band sounds ever — with a full synthetic system. The majority of the 14 pipers had chanter tubes to a Ross MCS, and this is where a lot of bands that rip out all their chanter tube entirely miss the point. The MCS has to work for the whole band, the whole sound. Every piper blows differently, some are dry blowers, some are wet, others in between. The fact is that they are all different. Some guys had the chanter section full with drying agent and others had just the thin divided section full. Vic Police chose reeds and set up the MCS of
each piper specifically to their system. The reeds were chosen to complement each individual sys- tem and matched to the piper to ensure stability throughout the playing requirement whether they had a chanter tube or not. I am a relatively wet blower and for me not having a chanter tube wasn’t an option. Without a chanter tube, within 20 minutes my chanter reed would be starting to experience condensation and by 30 minutes it would be soaked. Each one of us had to achieve a result of getting to the end of our practice, competition or concert with just the right amount of moisture on our chanter reed and this meant finding exactly the right combination to use in our MCS. Every one of us where different! I always have my chanter section full. I’d dry about one third of the dry- ing agent and leave the rest in the canister that already has a certain amount of moisture in it. I would then mix that with the dried agent. We would never dry out the whole section as this would leave the reed too dry to start with. My advice for lower grade bands would be
that even if the piper is a relatively dry blower and the chanter canister section has very little
PIPING TODAY • 43
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