Why 90% of Pipe Chanter Reeds Never Get Played: How to Stop Wasting Money on Bad Reeds
by Jori Chisholm, Founder of BagpipeLessons.com
Last Updated: August 22, 2026
Every piper has done it. You order reeds, you wait weeks for them, you open the package, and not one of them is any good.
I once ordered three dozen pipe chanter reeds from a famous reed maker. Thirty-six reeds, and not one was playable. I am not alone in that. The pipe major of a multiple world champion pipe band told me, completely matter-of-factly, that only about 10% of the reeds he picks out ever get played in his band.
In this video I go through the problems with buying pipe chanter reeds, I explain why cane makes every reed different, and I show you what I did about it: the Foundation Pipe Chanter Reed, made to my specifications by one of the world’s top reed makers, tested for strength, and hand-selected by me for your order.
Key Points in this Video:
- Why reed strength ratings mean almost nothing when you order online
- Why the reed that arrives is not the reed that was tested
- What shipping does to cane
- Why mail order reeds are often a random grab from the pile
- Why a dried-out reed on a vendor table tells you nothing, even if you get to blow on it
- Why you should never have to fix a brand new reed
- What bad reeds really cost you in money, practice time and confidence
- Reed strength in inches of water, and where most pipers actually sit
- How every Foundation Pipe Chanter Reed is tested, hand-selected, and shipped
Links to Products Mentioned in the Video:
- Foundation Pipe Chanter Reed
- Precision Reed Tester and Drone Adapter
- Bagpipe Gauge
- Tone Protector Reed Case
- Tone Protector Chanter Cap
- The Piper’s Ultimate Reed Poker
- Precision Tuning Tool Kit
- Infinity Pipe Chanter
Watch the full video above, and read the complete transcript below.
Video Transcript: Hey, everybody. Jori Chisholm here from BagpipeLessons.com. Today, I want to talk about something really important that pipers don’t talk about too often. Everybody knows it, everyone has experienced it, but nobody says it, and that is the terrible quality of the reeds that we are mostly buying. Over my many years in piping, I have wasted thousands of dollars on pipe chanter reeds.
I’m not exaggerating. Reeds I paid for, reeds I waited for, reeds that turned out to be completely unplayable, and I never played a single note on them. There’s still this one time in particular I think about. I ordered three dozen reeds from a famous bagpipe reed maker. That’s 36 reeds, and out of all 36, literally zero were playable.
And here’s the thing, this is actually a pretty common occurrence, and it’s not just for me.
Earlier this year, I was sitting in on a reed and tuning workshop that was being given by the pipe major of a very famous multiple world champion pipe band, and this pipe major mentioned completely matter-of-factly, like it was the most normal thing to say, that only about 10% of the reeds that he picked out would ever actually get played in his band.
10%. Just think about that for a second. This is someone who’s at the very top of the piping world, decades of experience, that has the first pick of any batch of reeds, and still 90% of the reeds end up not being played. I think that’s ridiculous, and it shouldn’t be that way. And I want to be really clear, this is not ancient history.
This workshop was just in the last year. And I have another experience that’s even more recent. Just a few weeks ago, one of my students who I teach online was visiting my house in Seattle, and we had a couple of days of lessons in person. He brought with him his Tone Protector reed cases full of reeds that he had recently purchased.
He’d been looking for reeds and wanted to try out some different reeds he hadn’t seen before and wanted to go through these reeds with me and figure out which ones were any good. One of these reed cases was a dozen reeds from a reed maker, I’m not going to name the name, and we could not get a single one of these reeds to work.
Zero good reeds out of twelve. Some of these reeds were a little bit too hard, and some were completely non-responsive. So hard you could literally blow through them and make no sound, just the sound of air rushing through the reed. Then my student had a couple others that he’d picked up at a piping workshop.
Same story. These reeds were terrible. He looked at me and said, “Well, what should I do? Can we make them work?” And honestly, I said, “I doubt it.”
We had a whole discussion about this and the quality of reeds. It is so common in the piping world that you buy reeds either from a shop or from a reed maker, but you get absolute junk, and pipers are expected to pay money for this.
And he said, “Well, if they’re not playable and they’re garbage, let’s put them in the garbage.” So that’s what we did. Took hundreds of dollars of brand-new reeds and put them in the trash.
That’s the way things are, but I don’t think it should be that way. It can be better. Life is too short for bad reeds, and you should not be paying money for bad reeds. That’s what this video is about.
Pipe chanter reeds are all individually made by hand from a natural material, which is cane. Cane is like a bamboo. And it has the perfect properties of stiffness and lightness, so it’s used for all kinds of reed instruments, not just bagpipe reeds, but clarinets, saxophones, oboes, bassoons, and so forth.
It’s a hygroscopic material, which means it’s constantly absorbing and releasing moisture from the air around it.
Every piece of cane is different, just like every piece of wood is different. So two reeds from the same batch made by the same maker on the same exact day can behave completely differently.
So that’s the fact of life with reeds, and it’s not anybody’s fault necessarily, but it does explain why reeds are so different and finding a good reed matters so much. So here’s seven problems with pipe chanter reeds that every piper knows about. Number one. There is no industry-wide standard for reed strength.
What one maker calls a medium or an easy plus, somebody else calls a hard. And historically, the way we determine the strength of the reed is by somebody blowing on the reed and coming up with their opinion. A subjective blow test, not a measurement. So when you’re ordering online, you’re guessing, and honestly, the person who’s selling it to you might be guessing too.
Number two, the reed that you ordered is not the reed that arrives to you. Because cane is hygroscopic, it’s changing constantly depending on the moisture content of the air where it’s being stored. So a reed that’s made and tested in a humid climate, if it’s sent through the mail, it’s going to dry out on its way to you.
It sits in a package, it sits in a mail truck, in the hold of an airplane. It’s usually cold and dry and not a controlled humidity environment. By the time that reed reaches you several weeks later, it’s probably bone dry, and a reed that’s so dry behaves completely differently than it does when you’ve played it in.
It’s thin, it’s sharp, it can be really easy, it can be really hard. It’s definitely going to be unstable until you get that moisture back into the reeds.
Number three, it’s a random grab from the pile. Unless you’re buying from a reed maker or from a source that you can trust who really knows what type of reed you want, and you can trust them to pick out the reed that you have ordered, mail order reeds can sometimes just be a random grab from the pile.
Someone reaches into the box, pulls out how many you ordered, puts them into an envelope, and sends them to you. Nobody’s testing that individual reed to see if it’s actually any good. You’re relying on luck. Did you get a good one out of that pile? And it can be even worse.
If you go to a Highland Games or a piping workshop, these events where you have vendors selling bagpipe supplies, you’ll see it sitting on the table. You’ve got little cardboard boxes or those clear plastic trays sitting there with reeds that are completely dried out, sitting in the open air all day long, unsealed.
I would never buy reeds sitting on a table like that for two reasons. First, they’ve been picked through. Other pipers have been there before you, going through them, taking the good ones, putting the rest back. Second, those reeds are bone dry. Even if you have the chance to test them, testing them tells you nothing when you have a dried out reed.
It’s not going to respond anything like it will once it’s properly hydrated. You’re making a decision to buy that reed on incomplete and bad information.
In order to judge it properly, it needs to be in a humidity-controlled environment, like a Tone Protector reed case. I would say for a minimum of 24 hours, but three days or more is even better. You do not see those typically when you’re buying reeds from a vendor table.
Four, it’s hard to really test your reed. If you’re picking out reeds in person, yeah, maybe you can blow on them and they’re dry. But you don’t really have a chance to test if it really works in your chanter for the strength that you like to play. If you’re buying online, you can’t test them at all.
And usually, once you’ve played a reed, no one’s going to take it back from you, so the purchase is final, and every purchase is a guess.
Number five, your reed has to match your chanter. The sound that your instrument puts out is a combination of three things. It’s the reed, it’s your instrument, and it’s you.
Six, you should not have to fix a brand new reed, and this is the one that I feel most strongly about. Because getting a genuinely great reed straight out of the box is so rare in most cases, most of us have been trained through experience to immediately start working on that reed.
Lick it, pinch it, dunk it in water, poke it, sand it, scrape it, cut the tip, cut the corners off, wet it and then let it dry out. You’re going through your entire reed adjustment playbook just to get it to be the right strength, just to get it to be playable.
With a good new reed, you should not have to do that. A great reed is great right out of the box. That’s what I’m looking for. That should be the standard. The one thing I’ll do if the reed is slightly harder than I want is I put an elastic band on the bottom of the reed.
I have another video on my YouTube channel all about selecting and adjusting the strength of pipe chanter reeds. If the reed is otherwise really good but it’s a little bit stiff, you put that elastic band on the bottom.
It makes the reed easier to play, and it’s completely reversible. You can take the elastic band right off.
And much later, at the other end of the reed’s life, when it’s really good but it’s maybe gone slightly too easy for you, you can extend the life of your reed with my Piper’s Ultimate Reed Poker. It’s a specialized tool that opens up the reed from the inside, brings your reed back to life. It sounds great, it’s stable, and you get many more weeks or months out of that reed.
All these reed problems actually cost you, not just time and headaches, but real money. You’re trying different reed makers, different strengths, different batches. You’re spending hundreds of dollars or more just to end up with one reed that you actually like to play.
You end up with a drawer full of expensive maybe-someday reeds that you know deep down you’re never going to play. You don’t want to throw them out because you paid money for them, but deep down you know these reeds are never going to be played. And here’s the other thing, practice time.
All those hours picking out reeds, worrying about reeds, fussing and adjusting the reeds, poking, sanding, scraping, and ending up with nothing but disappointment.
It’s the unpredictability. It’s the stress. It’s the hassle of never knowing what you’re going to get. When something doesn’t sound right, you don’t know whether it’s the reed, the chanter, the setup, the weather, you. You order reeds from a respectable reed maker.
You think, “Well, it must be me. None of these sound any good.”
Beginners especially, they get an unplayable, terrible reed, and they can’t make it work, and they conclude that it’s them, that they need to learn how to do something with reed manipulation, or they need to get stronger, they need to learn something about how to make this terrible reed work.
Chirps, squeals, double toning F’s, unstable high G, crowy high A. These things are real. They happen to pipers, and a lot of times it’s the reed. It’s not you. It’s not your technique. It’s not how you’re blowing. It’s a terrible reed that is not happy in your chanter. And then when you finally do get a great reed you can’t get another one that sounds or feels the same.
And when that really great reed eventually goes, you’re starting the entire process all over again.
It shouldn’t be like this, and this is why the Foundation Reed exists. You shouldn’t have to buy 12 reeds, spend hours adjusting them, and hoping that just one of them happens to work. A pipe chanter reed should arrive to you properly selected for strength and quality and sound, tested, responsive, stable, and ready to play.
That’s it. That’s the whole idea of my Foundation Reed. I have been working with one of the world’s top reed makers to make a reed to my specifications, testing, taking notes, refining, testing again, until we had a reed that meets my standards every time. These reeds are made to my exact specifications, exactly the way I want them.
And my arrangement with my reed maker is simple. He only sends me reeds that match my requirements, and then I check them again when I pick the reeds for your order. So great reeds to me, great reeds selected by me for you. That’s the Foundation Reed, and you can only get them here at BagpipeLessons.com.
This right here is a Foundation Reed. It might look like every other reed, but this is not like every other reed. It’s efficient. You’re not killing yourself to get a tone. It responds to your pressure without fighting you. It’s pressure stable. You don’t get that wavering when your blowing fluctuates a little bit.
No chirping on grace notes. The F is stable, the D is stable, the high A is clear and bright and full. It’s balanced from top to bottom. Balanced means it’s a consistent volume all the way up the chanter from low G all the way up to high A.
Have you ever played one of these terrible reeds that are really hard to blow, really loud on the bottom hand, and then as you go further up the chanter, the quieter it gets, the high notes just disappear? That does not happen with the Foundation Reed. The tone is bright and clear, and it sits at a great pitch.
And if you play Piobaireachd, you are going to love the Piobaireachd high G. Very bright and very stable. The Foundation Reed is going to last you a long time because of how it’s made and how it’s stored.
It works in every type of pipe chanter I have ever tried, blackwood and plastic, older chanters and newer chanters, whether you’re looking for a reed for band or for solos.
I’ve tested my reed across all of the major brands of chanters, but of course my favorite is the Infinity Pipe Chanter by R.G. Hardie, but it works great in other brands too.
How hard your pipes are is a feeling, but it’s also a number that we can measure. Here’s how I think about strength in terms of inches of water, the same units you’ll see on my Bagpipe Gauge.
Very easy is from 20 to 25. Easy is from 25 to 30. Easy plus, 30 to 35. Medium, 35 to 40, and hard is 40 and up. Most pipers are right around easy or easy plus. On the gauge, straight up and down is 30, right in the middle of the green zone there.
Most pipers are really comfortable with a reed right around 30.
Every reed that I send out is tested for strength. I use the Bagpipe Gauge and my Precision Reed Tester so that you get exactly what you’ve ordered.
And honestly, you should get one of these. The Bagpipe Gauge measures your blowing pressure so you can actually see how steady you are and work on it. And with my new Precision Reed Tester, you can test every reed you own individually, chanter and drone, to get the exact strength and make adjustments for efficiency and airflow.
Do you have a reed that you’re playing now that you really like? Use my reed tester and Bagpipe Gauge to get the exact strength measurement for your favorite reed. And when you order a Foundation Reed, we can match it exactly to what you want.
I’ve got other videos on my YouTube channel all about using the Bagpipe Gauge and steady blowing, and also about using my Precision Reed Tester to perfectly match all four reeds in your pipes for ultimate steadiness and efficiency.
When you order a Foundation Reed, you tell me how many you want and the exact strength that you need. I go through the reeds and I personally select yours. I check the strength, I check the pitch, I make sure it’s right for your needs.
I only sell good reeds, and if a reed doesn’t pass my standards, and it doesn’t happen very often, I don’t sell it.
Think about what this solves. This is not a random grab from some reed pile, picked through leftovers on a vendor table.
This is not guessing at strength that means nothing. This is somebody that you can trust picking out the reed that you want so that you will be happy.
Imagine having a world-class bagpipe expert and a trusted friend standing there with you to pick out the perfect reed for you. Someone who knows exactly the strength and type of reed that you need, someone whose experience you can trust, someone who guarantees it will perform for you. That is what the Foundation Reed is.
Every Foundation Reed is stored in a Tone Protector at every single stage, from when the reeds are made, to when I test them, to when I select them and ship them to you.
Your reed arrives sealed and humidity stabilized at the optimal moisture content level. It is not dried out. It is not going to be shocked by humidity swings in transit. It arrives ready to play. No break-in period, no hoping it settles in. Performance ready right out of the package. When it arrives, I strongly recommend you keep your Foundation Reeds in a Tone Protector reed case or put it in your chanter with the Tone Protector chanter cap on it.
That’s how you keep your reed ready to perform consistently day after day for months and even years. I have a video on my channel all about my eight-year reed experiment. I have a chanter reed in a chanter back there in a Tone Protector, the original Tone Protector. It’s been in there for eight years, and it still looks new and sounds amazing.
So let me show you what I’m talking about so you can hear the Foundation Reed difference.
That is a great reed. We have a nice bright volume all the way up the scale. The top chanter notes don’t disappear. The F is super stable. The D is super stable. The high A is bright and clear and has that resonance that we love. No chirping, no weird stuff. That is what you’re getting when you order a Foundation Reed from me.
You want to take your piping to the next level in terms of tone. You’re tired of wasting money on junk reeds that turn out to be unplayable. Tired of being frustrated about opening a package and wondering what on earth is going on? Why are these reeds so weird?
Why are they so hard? Why do they not work? So here’s what happens when you order. Go to the Foundation Reed page at BagpipeLessons.com/foundation. You pick the strength that you want. You pick how many reeds you want. I recommend you get at least four. That gives you one to play right away and backups that are ready to go, so you’re never scrambling the week before a performance or a competition.
I have pipers in bands who order 10 or 20 at a time for their whole band. If you don’t already have a Tone Protector reed case, you can add one right there on the Foundation Reed page. It’s what keeps your reeds in this perfect humidity-controlled environment, so they do not dry out. You’re going to want a Tone Protector chanter cap for your pipe chanter as well.
That’s the reed that you’re actively playing. When I receive your order, I go in and I pick your reeds myself by hand one at a time for the exact strength that you asked for. If you ordered a Tone Protector reed case, I put the reeds right into the case and ship it to you inside the case, so they arrive to you perfectly humidity stabilized.
They never dry out. They are protected the whole way. If you don’t order a case, I send them to you in a sealed package, so when they arrive, you can open them up and put them directly into your own Tone Protector case. That way, they are humidity stabilized and protected the whole time. Every single reed is picked by me, and I give you my personal guarantee that you will be happy.
If you’re not happy with your reed for any reason, I will replace it, and I will send you a new one to guarantee that you’re happy.
And the response from pipers has been amazing. One piper emailed me to say, “The reeds you handpicked are life-changing. I can play now and not pinch, shave, squeeze, and generally blow my eyeballs.” Somebody else wrote to me saying, “The reeds are playing right out of the package with ease, just like you said.
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Full sound and quality. Never had this before ordering from many others. I just ordered more.” And somebody wrote to me, “The high A is the best of any reed I’ve ever played.” The thing that really tells me Foundation Reeds are working for pipers is the number of repeat customers.
The rate of repeat orders on Foundation Reeds is very high. Somebody orders one reed just to try it out, and then they come back and order four more. Then they have their bandmates ordering, and the next thing I know, I see orders for ten and twenty coming in for their whole band.
Let me be straight with you about the price, because these do cost more than most other reeds out there. But think about how you’ve bought reeds in the past. You buy a batch, and you throw out more than half of them, maybe all of them.
You pay for twelve reeds, and you’re lucky if you get two good ones. So if you compare the real numbers, not the price per reed, but the price per reed you actually play, the Foundation Reed is a great deal. On the Foundation Reed webpage, you will see that typical wait times are two to four weeks.
Usually it’s way faster than that, but I put two to four weeks on the website, so you’ll be surprised when your reeds arrive to you sooner rather than annoyed that they got to you later. And the reason there’s any wait at all is the thing that you are buying. Every reed is handmade, every reed is humidity stabilized, and every reed is personally selected by me for you at the exact strength you asked for.
I try to keep enough Foundation Reeds on order to stay ahead of things, but sometimes there’s a rush, and things can take two to four weeks.
So here’s a piece of advice. If you need a new reed, or if you think you might need a new reed, or if you just don’t have any good spare reeds sitting in your Tone Protector case for when that day comes, the time to order is today. You don’t want to be in the spot where your current reed goes and you’ve got nothing good on hand.
Here’s the best case scenario. Your number one reed starts to go, and it’s no big deal. You open up your Tone Protector reed case, you pick out a great reed that’s at the perfect strength, that’s been sitting there in the humidity stabilized environment and ready.
Do a little mouth blow, pop it in your chanter, and you are up and running with a great sound in a couple of minutes. That’s what having great reeds in a Tone Protector reed case does for you. Peace of mind, security, no stress. I think back to those 36 reeds that I bought that were garbage, and I think about that famous pipe major telling me that 90% of reeds never get played, and then standing in my own kitchen a few weeks ago with my student, taking hundreds of dollars of brand-new reeds and throwing them in the garbage.
None of that should be normal, and it doesn’t have to be. If you’re tired of playing the reed lottery, buying hundreds of dollars of reeds and hoping one of them works, try my Foundation Reed. Stop buying reeds and hoping that they’ll work.
Start buying reeds that are guaranteed to work. My Foundation Reed is available exclusively at BagpipeLessons.com/foundation. When you place your order, you tell me what strength you want, and I’ll personally select the perfect reed for you. And when you keep it in your Tone Protector, it’ll be playing great for months or years.
Everything at my BagpipeLessons.com shop is either something that I invented and designed or it’s something that I personally use and trust and recommend. Check it all out at BagpipeLessons.com/shop. If you like my style of teaching and you want to take your piping to the next level, check out my Inner Circle membership.
I do weekly live classes on Zoom, and I have a library of lessons, videos, product demonstrations, and more, hundreds and hundreds of lessons for you, all available to members of my Inner Circle at BagpipeLessons.com/membership.
We love playing the bagpipes, and we love playing the bagpipes so much more when our pipes sound great, feel great, are easy to tune, and stay in tune. And that means you need to practice, you need to work on your craft, you need a great instrument, and you need great reeds.
Life is too short for bad reeds. Check out my reeds at BagpipeLessons.com. Thanks for watching. Happy piping. Mahalo.
