Reed making for bagpipes volume 1

Description

Reed making for bagpipes – Volume 1

If one looks around in the bagpipe literature for information on the subject of reed making, one can see that the important subject of making and tuning simple striking reeds has been treated only very stepmotherly up to now. Although you can find a wealth of information on the Internet, you will search in vain for an exclusive and competent treatment of this problem.

This new brochure now aims to fill this gap. The new publication from the workshop of the author duo Pavel Cíp and Rudolf F. Klapka (‘Bagpipes in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia’) takes up a topic that will interest not only bock players, but any musician who plays a bagpipe with simple reeds that strike. This refers to bagpipes with a cylindrical bore of the melody pipe, such as bucks, sackpipes, torupill, gajda, etc., and of course bagpipes that use simple reeds in their drones.

The booklet contains a total of 48 pages with detailed instructions and many technical drawings of exact measurements for the manufacture and tuning of reeds for chanters in the common keys ‘E-flat’, ‘F’, ‘G’ and ‘B-flat’. A separate distinction is made between bellows-blown and mouth-blown bagpipes.

Techniques and problems of manufacture, tuning and repairs of such single reeds are treated practically. A list of possible malfunctions and instructions for their correction should make it possible to adapt the reeds to the respective pipes. This booklet wants to be an indispensable companion and guide that should not be missing in any hobby workshop and instrument case.

Pavel Cíp, well-known and renowned instrument maker from the Czech Republic, starts a series of musical instrument building instructions with detailed descriptions and technical drawings with this first volume. Construction instructions are already planned for a medieval bagpipe with cylindrical bore of the melody pipe (a simpler and quieter ancestor of conically bored market pipes) and for the so-called ‘Royal Bagpipe’ (reconstruction based on an illustration in the 13th century medieval song collection ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’).