This week I received a dozen new chanter reeds from Chris Apps of "Apps Reeds". They came in a nifty little reed case which is pretty cool all by itself.
Any how I had read that other McCallum owners were very happy with their App's reeds and I was getting low on my current supply of Ross so I thought I would give them a try too. I ordered a dozen medium strength reeds directly from Chris and it took about a week for them to arrive.
Helen and I popped one in my chanter and gave it a whirl, the first thing we noticed was that they were very easy, much easier than I was hoping for. We poked the reed to open it up a bit and that helped but we ended up needing to tape the chanter G and F holes to deal with other issues.
Even so, I think I am going to return half of them and ask for some stronger reeds, these are way to easy and won't last long with me. I don't like gut busters, but I don't like way easy reeds either.
I will play with the App's reeds for a bit to get used to them, I won't give up on my Ross reeds because they too sound pretty decent. Time will tell.