The GHB chanter, unlike most musical instruments, is not manufactured to any industry standard so the bore taper, throat size/placement, finger hole size/placement and reed seat are all arbitrarily created to the design parameters of the manufacturer. Because of the many pitch and reed design variations over the years, this has led to the purely subjective designs based on the individual maker’s preferences therefore, there is no correct design specification, only that the notes have relative tune and balance in the Mixolydean mode.

 Because of the absence of any known standard, making reeds for the GHB chanter becomes a quandary so, as there is no one reed design/profile that will suit all chanters. Because of this we have chosen to follow the fundamental designs of what is available and what is required.

While there are a group of currently available chanters by different makers that fall within the range of a particular reed profile, there will never be a one size fits all situation for GHB chanter reeds.

Every chanter has a fundamental design pitch, the pitch where all the holes (notes) are in relative tune with the scale. This design pitch is also intrinsically tied to the fundamental design pressure that was used when setting the tuning of the chanter by the manufacture. A given chanter that may be in relative tune at 28” H2O, could be as much as 9Hz out of relative tune on one or more holes at 35” H2O. One of the consequences of having no design standards.

All this being considered, when playing with cane chanter reeds, a piper needs a good reed skill-set in order to select and manipulate the correct reed for a given canter being played by a given piper. This is usually the job of the PM or the reed setter in the band situation. For the solo piper, without the necessary reed skills, the selection of a chanter reed can be problematic and this can lead to some catastrophic chanter hole vandalization and aggressive hole taping.

It is reasonable to believe that all (almost all) chanters left their manufacturer in tune at a given pitch and playing pressure therefore, with the appropriate reed skills, the correctly pitched reed at the correct pressure can be determined. Unfortunately, the appropriate reed skills are seldomly taught currently  like they were 50 years ago so now the common situation is to have a pool of reeds and try them all until a suitable reed is found. Yes, it is true that even a blind sparrow may eventually find a worm however, the time and frustration is just too much for some pipers so the pipes get put under the bed and forgotten, the craft dies a slow and painful death!

With our synthetic reeds we try to identify the chanter make and model, the approximate pressure range the piper wants to play at and the pitch the piper wishes to play at. We try as much as is practicable to craft the reed to suit the piper’s preferences, as much as is possible without the presence of the piper and their pipe set.

Our synthetic reeds do not require a warmup period to stabilize the reed, and as the synthetic reed is impervious to moisture, the synthetic reed does not need to be moisture normalised like traditional cane reeds do. Unlike cane reeds, the pitch and pressure a synthetic reed starts at, is the same pressure and pitch all the time the reed is played. No more out of tune pipes after a pause in playing, no more warming up for 15 minutes before piping at funeral or wedding ceremonies.

We make our retail reeds at Soft, Med and Firm with Soft being 22” H2O and the Firm starting around 30” H2O. The Med reed at about 26” H2O is almost 70% of current reed orders. We do make reeds softer than 22” for some very senior and very young pipers but these need to be carefully considered as very soft reeds can be rather bendy if the piper is unsteady.