Overtones and cane vs synthetic

[Tom MacKenzie]

At my pipe lesson today we were discussing cane vs synthetic reeds and how cane reeds just seem to have stronger overtones.

Has anyone done a study of the overtones of cane and synthetic reeds looking at the strength and the overtone profile over the frequency spectrum that they can share with us?

Many thanks.

tomm

[Pip01]

As was noted some years ago... "Nothing sounds like... cane."

[paul_111]

Check out Patrick McLaurin's site - he's bound to have something there

[Patrick McLaurin]

This is 3.5 years old but William McKenzie made some attempt at comparing reeds:

https://forums.bobdunsire.com/forum/great-highland-bagpipe/technique-instrument/110174-

You should be able to download the audio files from my site and run a frequency analysis on it in Audacity or similar.

[Tom MacKenzie]

Thank you that terrific resource!

Not knowing which drone sets were cane and which were synthetic is an obstacle to comparing just cane and just synthetic.

Also a recording made on a diigital recorder will filter the sound to accommodate the digital format compression and quantization technique.

Maybe there is a live to analog frequency specturn analyzer experiment out there somewhere.

Many thanks.

tomm

[Hot_Rod]

Hi Tom,

If you scroll down to post #10 in link that that Patrick posted, the reeds are identified.

They are:

A - Selbie
B - Ezeedrone (inverted bass)
C - Armstrong X-Treme
D - Canning (polycarbonate inverted bass)
E - Kinnaird Edge
F - Ezeedrone
G - Cane
H - Crozier Cane
I - Redwood
J - MG White Mamba

[Tom MacKenzie]

Many thanks. I will look at G and F and see what I can find.

[Patrick McLaurin]

I just did a very quick, non-rigorous survey of a couple cane reeds versus several synthetics in a Chris Terry tenor drone, mouth blowing (so no bass drone was tested). Using a 480 Hz reference chanter pitch, the 240 Hz fundamental and 480 Hz 1st overtone are about the same amplitude, regardless of material. The 2nd overtone, E at 720 Hz, is fairly minimal regardless of material, along with the 3rd and 4th (another A at 960 Hz and a C# at 1200 Hz), though there's some variability in how low they were. The 5th overtone, the second E at 1440 Hz, seemed to have a fairly large difference. Cane had a rather large amplitude 5th overtone E. From those synthetics sampled, those that exhibited the largest 5th overtone were the closest to cane in overall timbre (overtone reeds and redwood reeds).