Na Píobairí Uilleann

Chairman, NPU

An Píobaire

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Image: Ted Anderson addressing a workshop on reedmaking at the 2012 NPU Tionól in Listowel, with Benedict Koehler and Mick O’Brien. production company from Hollywood, who dug it up and used it to plant along a river and then blew it up in a movie with scenes about Viet Nam. Unfortunately, they took the end of the cane break that had the rare one inch diameter tubes Sean used. What was left was too small. I had harvested cane along the Russian River and other areas close to where I lived, but it was about as hard as the Spanish cane. I began driving with Sean around Northern California looking for stands of cane big enough to produce one inch tubes. We passed up a lot of cane that was only up to 22mm diameter. Most of these stands are now gone, victims of Project Arundo. Sean had discovered the best results were gotten from cane which had died and was standing dead in the cane break. Denis Brooks told me that Dan also harvested dead standing cane. There are a lot of myths about harvesting cane at least twenty feet from the water or at least ten feet above the water etc, etc., but they have not panned out in practice. I get any dead stalks I can find. After cutting the stalks in the field, I put them bundled up in the rafters of my garage. When cured for a couple of more years, I took them down and cut the stalks into individual tubes and sorted them by diameters. On each tube of cane is a scar from where the branches grow. It makes a hard streak down the tube below the scar. I cut about an 1/8th inch wide strip out of the tube including the scar. You don’t want that hard strip on one side of a reed. A one inch tube, after removing the strip could still yield five half inch slips. Most pipers were using 7/8 to 1 inch diameter cane, following Dan O’Dowd’s method. After a few years, just when I was going to consign a bunch of 3/4 to 7/8 inch diameter tubes to the fire, Geoff Woof wrote and asked for that size of cane. I was glad to get it to him rather than burn it. Several European customers had me cut the tubes into 4 1/2 inch long slips and pre-gouge the slips so the weight would be less than tube cane and they could ship in a small package, saving a bundle in postage costs. Sean and I harvested some beautiful cane by a marina near Lodi. It was the best quality we had ever found. The next time we retuned, the marina had removed all the cane there and it was replaced with river rock. I continued hunting cane on my own. I discovered some stands along the Sacramento River on the side of the levee away from the river and alongside an orchard. It had lots of larger cane and much of it was quite soft and produced lovely tone. I seldom saw any grey mold on cane from this source. I have often marked cane from this source with a green marking pen. I called it

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2014-02-14T00:00:00

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