I finally got not only a sounding reed but one that plays reasonably well in my chanter. I get most of the bottom octave bang-on (the F is a little off), my back D gurgles like a newborn and I can get a little ways up into the second octave. I need to replace the bridle (a crummy hack I made out of a twist-tie) with a proper copper strip which may help a bit to clean up the bottom octave and help me into the second. I seem to recall Daryl saying that the gurgling back D comes from air escaping so I’ll have to go back over the sides of the reed and make sure that they’re nice and airtight.

I think the major problem I was having before was not bringing the scrape far enough down the blades as well as not making the back of it (farthest from the lips) thin enough. While making the scrape I did a lot of comparing this one to one of the pair Neil sent with my pipes. Holding the two reeds up to the light was a great help in getting the thickness of the blades correct on mine.

Now I can move on to making reeds that sound bad as opposed to reeds that don’t sound at all!