Playing a “C” Chanter Over “D” Drones
by Mick Bauer
Tunes in keys or modes that have E or A as tonic typically sound awkward or even dissonant using a conventional "matched key" chanter and drone configuration (D chanter with D drones, etc.), but can sound great on a C chanter over D drones. This article will present technical and musical considerations; original, complete, transcriptions of two or three sets of tunes that sound particularly good using this technique; and a list of other suitable tunes available in standard sources (O'Neill, Walsh, etc.).
What's more stirring than the hearty buzz of a well-tuned set of drones, providing ancient, elemental harmony to the wavering line of a classic tune? When I started piping, I couldn't wait to add drones to my practice set; for me, the drones are an absolutely essential part of the piping experience. I've never regretted upgrading to a half-set just six months after I started, ignoring the conventional wisdom that says you can't touch drones until after a lengthy, chaperoned engagement with the chanter alone.
But drones don't seem to fit every tune, do they? In particular, there are many tunes having E or A as tonic ("home" pitch) that sound awkward or even dissonant with the drones turned on. Must we be resigned to either living without any bot- tom on those tunes, or resorting to playing with guitarists and other disreputable persons? Not if you have a C chanter, you don't! In this article I'll describe the very simple technique of combining a C chanter with D drones (or, potentially, combining any chanter with drones tuned a whole-step flatter).
It isn't rocket science, but there are a few technical considerations to be aware of. I've also got some transcriptions of tunes that seem to work particularly well with this setup, plus a very long reference-list of tunes in “O'Neill's Music of Ireland” that I've test-driven for your convenience and safety.
The Technique
The theory behind this is simple; drones sound fine for practically any tune in the key of D, be- cause the drones sound the note D, that key's ton- ic. Drones work almost as well for most tunes in the key of G-major, because in G-major, D is the "dominant" (the fifth note of the scale), which is the second-most important note in the scale for harmonic purposes.
For tunes in the key of E-minor, however, D drones usually sound awful: as D is only a whole- step (major second) away from E, they sound dis- sonant any time an E is played. Harmonically, as D is E-minor's "subtonic" (the seventh note in the E-minor scale) it doesn't fit with very many of the chords that are likely to be implied by the tune's melodic movement.
Although we think of pre-modern Irish traditional music as having little in the way of harmony, the reason we have regulators, and for that matter, guitarists, is because more often than not, it's very easy to match appropriate-sounding chords to tunes. To give a very simple example, the first six notes of "Gander in the Pratie Hole" are F#-A-D- F#-A-D, an arpeggiated D-major chord. It's an understatement to say this part of the melody im- plies a D-major chord; the chord fairly well beats the listener upside the head!
But what if your chanter is pitched an entire whole-step lower than your drones? If you play a tune in E-minor on your C chanter, it will actually come out (sound) as D-minor; therefore, D drones will sound the tune's tonic, so, they'll sound terrific, all other things being equal.
Similarly, if you play a tune in A-major (or minor) on your C chanter, the tune will "sound" as G- major (or minor), in which case D drones will sound the tune's dominant. Granted, A-major isn't usually a good key for pipes since it requires the note G-sharp, which most un-keyed chanters lack completely, but there are some tunes in A-major lacking any Gs at all, and more than a few in A- mixolydian mode (which, like D-major, has just two sharp notes, F and C, but whose scale uses A as tonic and therefore has E as dominant).
In this way, combining D drones with a C chanter expands the range of tunes that "work" with drones on our instrument, from just tunes in D- major, G-major, D-mixolydian and G-lydian; to also include tunes in E-minor, A-major, A-dorian, and A-mixolydian (plus a couple other modes in which I have yet to find more than one actual tune).
Technical Considerations
Side Bar: Why not just transpose?
One may wonder, why it is worth the trouble of jury-rigging one’s pipes with mixed-key chanter and drones, instead of just transposing that tricky E- or A-major or minor tune to D- major or minor? Especially if the chanter in question is equipped with F-natural, G-sharp, and B-flat keys?
Transposing may in fact solve this problem more elegantly. There are two reasons it might not, though, for a given tune. First, even if you have a keyed chanter, keyed notes are often difficult to play in fast tunes. The same goes for cross fingerings, which may not work on your chanter, may only work on one octave or the other, or may be jarringly out of tune.
But irrespective of keywork and cross- fingerings, the tune may not simply fit into the not-quite-two-octave range of the chanter after transposing! There are indeed tunes with "compact" tonal ranges of an octave or even less, and these can be very easy to transpose successfully. But most traditional Irish tunes span at least an octave and a half; transposing these may well result in a version that requires notes that are too high or too low for your chanter.
So, what does it take to get a C chanter working with D drones? The first consideration is the outer diameter of your chanter's "gooseneck," and whether it fits the chanter-stock on your D drones' bag. There isn't necessarily as much variety in this dimension as you might think, so you might have as high as a 50% chance of it fitting just fine.
If your gooseneck is narrower than your chanter- stock's opening, you'll need to wrap it. While conventional wisdom is to use some sort of thread or floss for this sort of thing, that isn't a satisfactory approach if you want only a temporary, easily added and removed fix. And even if that isn't a concern, if the gooseneck is more than a little too small, you might need a lot of thread to bring it up to size.
My preferred fix, therefore, is to use a thin, long strip of cloth. If you like, you can rub some bees- wax or cobbler's wax onto a few inches of each end to discourage unraveling, but I don't bother with that myself. And since chanter stock openings are slightly conical, the natural compression involved in (gently) "screwing" the wrapped gooseneck in should minimize air-leakage through the cloth itself. Obviously, a dense, tightly woven cloth will leak less than a fluffy or loosely-woven fabric.
If your chanter's gooseneck is wider than your chanter stock's opening, you've got a harder job of it: you'll either need to ream the chanter stock (a radical, irreversible change that I don't recommend), tie in a different chanter stock (reversible but highly inconvenient), or fabricate some sort of "reducer," perhaps using a short length of PVC tubing and some sort of pipe-fitting (which will look strange but might work). If playing in E- minor is important enough to you, you could go so far as to buy second bag, and tie in a chanter- stock that matches your C chanter, and a drone stock (or cup) that fits your D drones, but most of us will instead simply hope that our C chanter's gooseneck is either a perfect fit with, or not much smaller than, the chanter stock.
A second technical consideration is tuning—you'll need to make sure the (nominal) "E" on your C chanter, which actually sounds as D, matches the pitch of your D drones. (Obviously, your drones also need to be in tune with themselves!). In most cases you should be able to adjust your drones to match your chanter, since they've got tuning- slides, and since many drones can be tuned as much as an entire semitone (half-step) up or down without too much loss of stability.
In contrast, your chanter can only be tuned by moving the reed in or out, which may change the response and intonation of your chanter in bad ways, in return for a very small change in pitch. So try adjusting the drones to match the chanter, and only if that doesn't do it should you resort to adjusting the chanter-reed too.
Be forewarned that tuning may be more of an is- sue than you expect. Remember, flat chanters are seldom tuned with A equal to 440 Hertz; traditionally, the "key" of flat chanters has been an ap- proximation at best, and an outright lie at worst, so it's possible that "E" on your C chanter sounds closer to D-sharp or D-flat, than to the D of your concert-pitch drones.
The third consideration is volume. As a general rule, flat chanters have a smaller bore, and are therefore quieter than concert-pitch chanters. Therefore, after all your work attaching your C chanter to the bag of your D drones, and tuning the drones to whatever wacky not-quite-D emerges when you finger "E" on your C chanter, you may find that your bright, aggressive drones completely drown out your mellow, sweet C chanter. What to do then?
The easiest solution is to shut off your bass drone, by touching the sound-hole or covering it with a bit of chanter tape. This should soften the total volume of your drones enough for your chanter to be heard. If not, you can try shutting or taping off a second drone; after all, even just one drone sounds better than none! (It's easier to tune to the chanter, as well.)
As a last resort, you can try "opening up" your chanter's reed by adjusting its bridle or otherwise making its lips go further apart in the middle. I'm not going to tell you how to do that: if you've never adjusted your chanter reed before, this is neither the best time nor the best reason to risk wrecking it now!
I actually had to do this recently with my Koehler C chanter, after it became very quiet with the change in seasons. Playing it with my Sky D drones happened to be what made me realize the chanter was quiet, but I doubt I would have messed with the reed unless I had been positive that the chanter was playing more quietly than usual, due to the very dry air that always swoops down into Minnesota from the Arctic each December. Even if you're experienced at adjusting reeds, doing so always carries some risk of cracking or other permanent damage.
On a related note, since quiet chanter reeds tend to be easy to play, and louder chanter reeds tend to be harder, the final technical consideration worth describing here relates to chanter reed hardness. If your drones play very stably with a chanter having a soft reed, they may not be so stable with a chanter having a hard reed: the greater bag-pressure you must use to play the harder chanter reed may have an adverse effect on your drones, including raising their pitch (though necessarily consistently higher across registers).
The reverse can also be true. Drones that are stable when played with a chanter whose reed is hard, may not respond well at all with the lighter bag-pressure necessary to play a chanter having a softer reed.
If you're lucky, you'll be able to compensate for this sort of difference on the drone end of the equation, possibly simply by re-tuning them. I'm not sure I would recommend making more direct adjustments to either your otherwise-fine drone reeds or your chanter reed, however. While drone reeds are generally simpler and more durable than chanter reeds, what they have in common is that small adjustments can have radical and/or unintended consequences. Maybe it's just me, but I find it difficult enough to get all three drone reeds playing stably across both octaves, that when I finally do, I go out of my way to leave them be! (Moving the drone slides doesn't count, since their positions don't directly or substantially affect the reeds themselves.)
Some Example Sets
Now that I've addressed every technical nuance I can think of for this method, that perhaps after all, isn’t so completely simple, let's move on to tunes. I don't have much to say about how to play them. The hard part is getting your C chanter fitted, tuned, and balanced with your D drones; once you've gotten that far, playing is the easy part!
Rather, I'm going to simply put three representative sets of tunes in front of you that would sound strange at best with the standard D drones plus D chanter configuration, but sound terrific with a C chanter over D drones. The first is a set of two reels: "Tarbolton" and "The Drunken Landlady."
As you can see, both these tunes are in E minor, as are the vast majority of tunes that work best when using a chanter pitched a whole-step lower than your drones. I transcribed this setting of "Tarbolton" from Johnny Doran's seminal recording. It's an incomplete transcription, showing only the "base" tune for each of the tune's two sections without very much of Doran's wonderful variation and embellishment, but it's a fun starting point.
My "Drunken Landlady" transcription represents my own "piperized" take on Geraldine Cotter's version in the "Irish Session Tunes: The Green Book."
Next up are two slip-jigs in E-minor, “The Hills of Ireland” and “A Fig for a Kiss.” Both of these set- tings are verbatim copies from "O'Neill's Music of Ireland," without any pipification on my part. In- trepid pipers will see plenty of opportunities for tarting them up with staccato triplets, popping, and the like.
And for our final example set, here are two double jigs, also from "O'Neill's Music of Ireland," "Sweet Biddy Daly” and “Come in From the Rain."
Unlike all the other tunes in these three example sets, "Sweet Biddy Daly" is in A-major, which isn't normally a pipe-friendly key due to its G-sharps, but this tune happens to lack any Gs whatsoever! It ends on an A quarter-note, which leads very nicely into the initial A eighth-note of "Come In From the Rain."
I like the contrast between "Biddy Daly's" key of A-major, against which the dominant tone D sounds nice, versus "Come In From the Rain's" key E-minor, against which the D drones play the tonic. I find the effect of this change in drone-note's function to be dramatic and stirring. But even if it doesn't catch your ear in the same way (music is subjective after all), I hope this demonstrates the possibilities of playing a C chanter over your D drones.
Coda: Mining "O'Neill's"
When I initially conceived this article, I had the grand intention of surveying a variety of standard books of piping tunes for overlooked gems in E and A keys/modes. As you can see from my examples, however, between that point and the article's deadline, I didn't make it past "O'Neill's Mu- sic of Ireland."
This was not due strictly to time constraints. First, Cpt. Francis O'Neill is one of my piping heroes (did you know that besides his many other achievements, he played the Uilleann pipes?). Lately I've been reading everything by and about Cpt. O'Neill that I can get my hands on.
More importantly, O'Neill's magnum opus is still the richest single-volume source of traditional Irish tunes, for all its quirks (for example, his transcriber, Sgt. James O'Neill, botched a number of tunes' key-signatures, but with no worse effect than those transcriptions having avoidable accidentals).
It's true that even by the time Cpt. O'Neill died in 1936, many of the tunes in his collection had fallen out of fashion, with the remainder evolving through the oral/aural tradition. In general, the popularity of Irish traditional music had plum- meted. O'Neill lived to see the advent of both the radio and the jazz/swing music it helped to popularize. Those trends have certainly continued.
Yet a trip back to O'Neill's enormous 1903 snap- shot of the state of Irish tunes is always worth- while. Very many of his versions are still considered standard, by many players. The chapter of Turlough O'Carolan tunes is a small goldmine all on its own. Nowhere else will you find so many slip jigs, and the sheer variety of diverse material remains impressive. Finally, I can't resist mentioning that any time we pipers mine "O'Neill's Music of Ireland," we're following in the footsteps of Seamus Ennis, who as a teenager relied on this book to build his initial repertoire.
So, I leave it to you to find E- and A-keyed/moded tunes in your own repertoire, in Walsh's outstanding "Pipe-Friendly Tunes," Bunting's and Petrie's respective collections, and the rest. In the meantime, I'll save you the trouble of further trolling through the entirety of "O'Neill's Music of Ireland" for this purpose, by providing a list of every such tune I've found out of O'Neill's 1,850: this list is online at http://www.gnipc.org/gallery/combining-a-c-chanter/.
Mick Bauer is President of the Great Northern Irish Pipers Club.
For a complete PDF of the original Winter2013 Pipers Review this article is from, click here.
