Filing my Nut

Ever since Amy got me this Bouzouki, the B (2nd fret, 3rd course) has been sharp. As I moved up the fretboard to the octave fret, the notes got more in tune, so I knew the position of the bridge was okay. My suspicion was that the strings were too high off the fretboard, which meant the nut needed work.

The nut is a little block of wood, plastic, or bone, between the head (where the tuners are) and the fretboard. It lifts the strings up off the fretboard so that they don’t buzz against the frets. But if it lifts them too high, you can get the exact kind of intonation problem I was having.

After some research and hand-wringing, I ordered a nut file. This is nothing more than a file with a very specific width (0.17 inches in this case). A few days of worrying later, I worked up the gumption to file the groove on the strings in the 3rd course. I went slowly and deliberately: untension string, move it away from the nut, file the groove twice, blow the filings away, move the string back, tune the string back to A, play B and check tuning, repeat.

It worked! My B is in tune for the first time, my G major chord is in tune for the first time, and the instrument is just a joy to play.

Uilleann Practice Chanter

In other musical news, the reed finally arrived for the practice chanter I found on printables.

Scottish (Great Highland) bagpipes, having way more interest than the Irish (Uilleann) bagpipes I play, have a lot more cool innovations available. One of them is that you can get a relatively cheap ($70 or so) “practice chanter”, use a relatively cheap ($10 or so) polystyrene “practice chanter reed”, and you’re all set to start learning tunes, using your lungs as the bag. The “practice set” of Uilleann pipes is a full chanter, a bag, an air hose, and a bellows, costing between $800 and $1600.

I think I can design a 3d-printable mouth-blown practice Uilleann chanter, which takes the same $10 polystyrene reed available for the Scottish practice chanter. The chanter itself would use around $1 worth of PLA filament.

Step 1 was putting the reed into the model I already had printed. The intonation on a few notes is off, but otherwise it sounds pretty good. I can recreate the model in OpenSCAD, and fiddle with hole placement.

Step 2 was putting the reed in my Uilleann chanter. The intonation is pretty bad, but I was actually able to get up into the second octave, which surprised me. Another thing that surprised me is how much louder it was.

I’ve learned two things here:

It should be possible, and well within my abilities, to make an Uilleann chanter for this polystyrene reed. I’ll need to go through a number of failed prototypes to get the intonation right, and I’ll have to make a “mouthpiece”, but it’s definitely doable.
It should be possible to make a quieter Uilleann chanter, probably just by narrowing the bore. This would be a very nice thing to have, so I’m not blasting out my wife when we play together in the house.

I may start with the second one first: making something to play with my existing cane reed, but that is quieter. Then I’ll move onto creating a whole new chanter essentially from scratch, which can be mouth-blown and take one of the $10 practice chanter reeds.

By the end of this, I should have something that will let people play tunes on an acoustic Uilleann chanter, and will cost under $15 in materials! That’s 1% of the price: you could buy 100 of these for the amount of money it currently costs just to get started with the Uilleann pipes.

This could make a tremendous difference is the average age of the beginner piper. No parent in their right mind is going to drop $1500 on an instrument their child may get bored with after a week; but $15 is absolutely doable.