Pastoral Pipes

[erracht]

Do pastoral pipes have the same chanter sound
as uillean pipes?

[Ian Lawther]

Originally posted by erracht:
Do pastoral pipes have the same chanter sound
as uillean pipes?

Hmmm. How do you describe sound.

Hamish Moore plays a set on one of his early recordings (for one track). They are flatter than modern pitch uilleann pipes, and the sound is somewhere between a flat set of uilleanns and a Scottish smallpipe.

I've just done a quick search for a sound clip on line and can't find one - I'll look again later in more detail.

Ian.

[John Dally]

Bruce Childress is a real Pastoral Pipe fanatic. He has a website, which I have not visited, but it may have audio clips. I think the website is www.bcbagpipes.org (http://www.bcbagpipes.org) or something like that.
Re: Hamish Moore's first and second recordings. I was just listening to these again over the weekend, while putting my cassette tapes onto a minidisk for future listening, and I found myself wondering what they did in the studio to get the sound that actually comes out. It sounds "touched" to me, but I can say how. You can dramatically change the sound of any given pipe after you've recorded it. Don't know about the PP per se, but the SSP do sound like they've been deepened and layered. Just a thought, not a criticism. The sound on the recordings is very nice.

[Royce]

Recording UP is pretty forgiving if you don't get the mike too close because of the transient spikes from all that squeaking and barking and popping. The tone seems to record very well.

Various smallpipes for whatever reason sound like rubbish many times and are hard to match a mike/room and mike position to. Then it's a lot of fooling with equalization and figuring out what sort of reverb/fx program actually sounds good with them. The tone loses all definition very easily playing with reverb.

The NSP seem easier to capture than ssp, particularly the lower pitched ssp.