That's what my pipe instructor told me when we started to work on my 440 Hz concert A pipes. He retracted his slurs against the maker when I reminded him that it's a Hamish Moore chanter, and we commenced to rain curses down upon the name of the man who makes the reeds.

That proving unproductive, I mentioned that I had got a Bill Durham reed to work at 432 Hz, and figured another might at 440. Durham makes a fine reed, it's what we use in band and what I use in solo, and I wanted to work with that.

We tried a variety of reeds, all of which tuned about right, but had serious turbulence, but only on E. Then John remembered something a bandmate in CAPD told him about what to do when a reed did this, took a razor blade, and shaved off a bit of the shoulder of the reed - the details I'm sketchy on - and suddenly it was sounding pretty good. He then put together one bass drone reed and one tenor drone reed (we didn't have time for the other, and were running 30 minutes over my lesson as it was), and as I predicted, they were 1.5" and 1" longer, respectively, than the standard drone reeds. I'm going to play these in for a week and see how they settle in, and we'll do the second tenor drone and try again on the others next week if necessary.

He felt that it sounded a bit too shrill and shawm-like, despite being lower pitched, but it's always dangerous to judge a chanter without drones, since a chanter alone always sounds shriller than with drones. I liked the high-hand notes a lot, especially with the drones. The low A was a little unstable, we'll have to watch that. It's an iterative process.

In the end, John admitted, "It could just be the pitch that's throwing my perception off. I'm used to hearing bagpipes in bagpipe pitch, and when I hear this, my brain starts judging it against an oboe. It sounds like an unconstrained double reed, which, surprise, it is!"

So in the end, I'm fairly happy so far. I've got a good strong reed for 440, a good strong reed for 432, and a weak back-up reed for 440. What I need to do is play this for more musicians who aren't necessarily pipers to get their sense of the sound - because pipers are going to have 474 stuck in their head. Anders liked the sound of the 432 Hz reed, and I want to run the 440 setup by him.

At the same time, I bought one of my instructor's copies of the complete bound edition of the Piobaireachd Society books 1-15. A very nice tome, and it'll be helpful as I start to learn more piobaireachd.