Francis, I think the tuning of modern UP is optimised when they're played closed. If the chanter's played open, it drinks more air, and plays sharper.
Johnny Doran played off the knee a lot, and when Willie Clancy 1st heard him, he thought he was out of tune - a heresy which he repented in later life. Off the knee is a wilder sound, partly because of the element of danger. If you think of UP, played open, in terms of its origin, as a Pastoral pipe chanter with the end missing, then you realise the tuning must be sharpened a bit, without extra fingers downstream to bring it back into tune. However with a conical bore the effect of a finger more or less, more than 2 holes downstream, is fairly minimal. The art in designing them must be to make sure the tuning is consistent (if not the same), across both octaves, in either fingering system. It must be said that not all chanters I've heard succeeded in this. John ________________________________________ From: lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu [lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu] on behalf of Francis Wood [oatenp...@googlemail.com] Sent: 17 June 2011 20:58 To: ch...@harris405.plus.com Cc: Dartmouth nsp list N.P.S. site Subject: [NSP] Re: Deaf/dead On 17 Jun 2011, at 14:14, ch...@harris405.plus.com wrote: > The Uilleann pipe chanter can be, and often is, played closed, by resting > the chanter on the knee. > It's possible, but more difficult, to get just as clean, detatched playing > as with nsp. > > However this isn't seen as a fundamental distinguishing feature, and is > not insisted upon. The chanter can be played open or closed, and is indeed > played both ways, to get more varied effects. Hello Chris, Thanks for this. I'm ignorant about Uilleann pipes as you'll probably gather. But do you mean to say that the chanter can be played using two radically different fingering systems and still remain _in tune_? If not, can the closed method probably really and properly be regarded as part of the core technique of those pipes? Francis To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
