Hello John Like everything else it is a compromise and also depends on what you want to play. Having said that a point will be reached when increased physical effort makes it harder to play sensitively. The first 17 key chanter I ever tried was a Clough - Picknell one which had belonged to Tom himself. It seemed to have almost half a snooker ball as the end-stop and weigh about a kilogram. I can't remember now who it was that let me try it but when I said I couldn't understand how Tom played such technically demanding music on it, it was explained that he used a 7 key chanter for most of his playing. That experience as a player with only a couple of years under my belt put me off trying another 17 key chanter until I decided to buy one of my own and get stuck in several years later. Within a year I had sold it on and bought a fiddle. The lack of fluency inherent in the keying makes it an very unsatisfying proposition for me. There are a couple of top notch pipers out there who consistently eschew the bottom (thumb-thumb) D - F# jumps in Bill Charlton's fancy. Often a bottom E is substituted giving a thumb-little finger flow. This problem is magnified on a 17 key chanter. There are some great pieces out there which demand these keys but they are less than 2% of the traditional repertoire (if we take the NPS tunes books as our guide). The other factor for me is one of tone. For me each added key is rather like adding weight to a fiddle tailpiece. An old wooden tailpiece with 4 heavy string adjusters can still give a pleasing sound but replace it with a modern lightweight design with integral adjusters and there is a noticeable improvement in, for want of a better phrase, I call the zing factor. As I say 17 key chanters can still sound great but my 5 favourite sounding chanters are all 7 key. 2 of them are Reid, the others are by Jack Armstrong, Mike Nelson and Philip Gruar. These also made 17 key (well at least 16 key) chanters which I've heard often but for zingy ring the 7s have it every time. In a nutshell the tune possibilities expand with the number of keys but the tonal/musical possibilities are greater with fewer keys. We pays our money and takes our choice. My advice is stick with 13 and get another instrument for other tunes. There's a very good chance it will be the instrument for which the tune was made in the first place. I know this is a very personal (and very unpopular) opinion but I can assure people that I am not alone in this. Cheers Anthony
John Dally <[email protected]> Subject: [NSP] a key question for NSPipers To: "NSP group" <[email protected]> Date: Tuesday, 14 December, 2010, 16:58 When do you qualify to really "need" more keys? When I ordered my set a number of years ago I was convinced that the desire for 17 keys was really too much, so I ordered a thirteen key set instead. Now I find myself reaching for the two "missing" Bb's and C#'s. Is there such a thing as "key-envy"? Is it presumptuous or perhaps a failure of imagination to want more keys? How many keys is enough? I hear tell of twenty five key chanters now. Is this obsession a pipemaker's nightmare? cheers, John To get on or off this list see list information at [1]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
