Any experience with Pakistani Uilleann Bagpipes?

[Skipper1]

Hi - I am currently learning the elbow pipes and contacted a local techer to help me. He is a member of a group of pipers on the island here who meet once a month to "jam". The group maintains a cache of practice sets that they loan out to serious students. Perphaps there is a similar group in your area.

[OC Richard]

OK here I am to chime in!!

Yes avoid Pakistani uilleann pipes (as well as Pakistani "Irish" flutes) like the plague. They do not work, cannot work. Actually uilleann pipemaker Tim Britton was, at one time, getting these cheap Pakistani uilleann chanters and reboring them and repositioning the fingerholes and re-reeding them in an attempt to get them to work. I haven't tried one of these modified chanters myself, but I've heard that they're not very good, the end product not worth the effort Tim was putting in to the project. (Disclaimer: this is old news, and second-hand news to boot, so you're best off contacting Tim yourself and finding out about it.)

I should stress here that uilleann pipes are COMPLETELY different from Highland pipes in every way, perhaps in no way more so than the issue of chanter reeds.

With Highland pipes you can order chanter reeds by the dozen. They're relatively cheap and easy to obtain. And Highland reeds are fairly interchangable between chanters, for example I use Ross reeds and they work in my old 1960s Hardie 466 chanter, a new McCallum 466 chanter, a new McCallum 480 chanter, and in fact any chanter I've owned over the last decade or so.

Such a situation is inconceivable in the uilleann world, and there is no way for me to convey to a Highland piper what the uilleann chanter reed situation is like. (But here goes...)

Say you pick up an uilleann chanter somewhere, on Ebay or what not. There's a good chance that the chanter reed (if there is one) won't work right in your particular climate. So now you have a useless stick of wood.

But, you say, there are a load of uilleann pipemakers in the world! Can't I just order a reed from one of them? Well yes you can, but the chance of it working in your chanter is near zero. You could order one chanter reed from every pipemaker on earth and I would wager that none of them work in your chanter.

Or, you could get an uilleann chanter from a current maker. Surely that's a guaranteed way to get a chanter with a reed that works right?

Sadly many a customer has received his lovely new chanter only to find that the reed doesn't work right. Thinking that it's a unique defect in that one particular reed, one might (if lucky) get another reed or two from the chanter maker only to discover that none of them play right in the chanter. Why? There are some chanter makers who happen to make a style of reed that isn't really compatible with the style of chanter they make, and are incapable of successfully reeding the chanters they make.

Now you may find this story hard to believe, but I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears: At a tionol (piper's gathering) a number of years ago a certain well-known and well-respected pipemaker had a booth with around ten new uilleann chanters he'd recently made, all fitted with reeds of his own make. I was amazed to hear, when I heard people try these chanters over and over, that each chanter produced a horribly out-of-tune scale. The wonder of the thing was that each chanter's scale was out-of-tune in its own unique way: one with a very flat 2nd octave, one with a very sharp 2nd octave, one with a very flat B, one with a very sharp B, and so on. I would think that such a feat would be well-nigh impossible to achieve on purpose, much less by accident.

BTW the maker himself looked benignly on while this was taking place, evidently unaware of it all. Had I been the maker I would have 1) made sure that all the chanters had proper reeds before the tionol and 2) if someone tried a chanter and something was off, immediately fix the problem.

And uilleann chanter reeds are very expensive! Highland reeds are dirt-cheap by comparison. I recently bought an uillean chanter off a friend for $350 (a fantastic bargain) and he informed me that that was what the chanter reed had cost.

Why so expensive? It can take a reedmaker many hours of experimenting to devise a reed design that works in a particular chanter.

Reeds are very chanter-specific. It's common even for chanters by the same maker to have reeds which are not compatible. (There's only one maker I can think of that makes uilleann chanters so consistently that reeds can be swapped between them.)

So... what to do?

My best answer for a beginner is to get a David Daye "pennychanter". They're ugly as sin but Dave has spent the time on what counts: developing a chanter design and reed design which work in perfect conjunction. (It sure helps that his chanters have bores which are exactly the same from chanter to chanter, so that his reeds always work right in them.)

[Skipper1]

As it turns out I just ordered a practice set from David. Looking forward to receiving it some time early next year. And I can second the comments of the termperment of reeds. The loaner pipes I have are from a very good maker and he can do wonders with them. I on the other hand, have good days and bad days - and Victoria's climate dosent help either.

[James Hood]

No experience with Pakistani bagpipes...

...but played "Scotland The Brave" and "Wild Mountain Thyme" on sitar and got a confused but pleased reaction from some folks.

[chemist93]

I'm like the others with the thumbs down. I tried a Pakistani practice chanter instead of a Dunbar. Waste of money, etc.

[Eyler]

Thanks for such a long reply to my question. After looking here and at Bob Dunshire's forum and checking out the classifieds at Chiff and Fipple, Uillean Obsession, etc. and pondering over all the excellent replies, I decided to order a practice set from John Pedersen in California. He makes a beautiful instrument that people love to play. I feel like his set will be one that I can add to and have a really nice profession set when I'm finished. We had a number of discussions and he plans to show me how to make my own reeds when the instrument is ready. He says its not only important to know how so you won't be without reeds, but even more so, its important to know how to adjust your reeds when that don't sound right.
In the meantime until I get my set, I am learning tunes on the tin whistle but using Uilleann fingerings (at least as close as I can do). I'll also be lining up an instructor (via Skype) because I've learned a number of instruments with and without an instructor and discovered that the instructor route is much more efficient and the money is well spent.
Again, I want to say that living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I am on my own and I appreciate the willingness that you had to help me.

Eyler