Chords for Matt MacIsaac reviews the Blair Digital Chanter

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What's up, everybody?
I'm Matt McKisick.
Today we're going to look at the Blair Digital Chanter, and we're going to play a tune on it.
Hope you enjoy.
_ _ _ _ So back in November, Pipestrums magazine very [Bm] kindly asked me to
review the Blair Digital Chanter, and I happily agreed.
So when it arrived last week, I turned the camera on and
unboxed it.
So what you're seeing now is me opening it for the first time.
So I opened the cardboard box that it comes in and pulled out the really nice padded case.
I wasn't really expecting it.
It's got a nice rubberized logo, nice zipper.
It's well padded.
It's about 15 inches long and
_ comes with the following.
So you've got a braided USB cable and a plastic mouthpiece that screws into the top.
It's not required for playing, but it does help to keep the thing steady when you're playing it.
Of course, pulling off the plastic is the most satisfying part.
So one of the most welcome features
I think is that it has real holes with optical sensors inside them.
That means that it's not using touch
to trigger the sounds.
And if your hands are sweaty or dry, you'll know that that can wreak havoc on
trying to play a tune.
So I spent about five minutes trying to turn the thing on back and forth, up and down,
until I finally consulted the manual which said that it goes up, down, and in.
And that's how you select
the various menus.
The OLED screen is a nice touch.
Because it reproduces such dark blacks,
it doesn't really look like a screen.
It just looks like black letters coming out of the chanter.
It's pretty neat.
_ _ Charging it is fairly simple, although I'd love to see a charging icon that tells you when it's full.
This icon does tell you it's charging, which is good, but you don't know how long it needs to fill up completely.
So many of the
different aspects of this chanter are customizable, including all of the sensor holes.
So from low A up to high A, you could control the hole from
to plus 99 and back down to minus 99, which makes it almost infinitely customizable. It also has an ambient light regulator, which means when you go outside in the bright sun or in a bright room, perhaps, it'll adjust the sensors accordingly. _ You can adjust the display brightness. You can adjust the [E] pitch, the instrument. You can adjust the bass drone and the tenor drone independently. You can change the bass and the treble balance. You can play with the metronome. And I think the biggest thing that's actually missing from this at the moment is the updater. _ Because that's promising that you can upload your own sounds. Now, imagine being able to upload the sound of your own bagpipe onto your digital chanter and practice like that. _ So using this chanter as a MIDI controller is really simple, too. Again, you just take the end of the USB, plug it in your computer and open your favorite audio workstation, like GarageBand, like I'm using here. And this is where you can play different sounds on the chanter. _ _ [Db] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ [Ab] _ _ [A] _
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_ [C] _ _ _ _ _ So I guess it's time to show you what it actually sounds like. I'm going to play a reel that I've been working on [G] that's really [F] the Handshaker by Alan MacDonald, but I've turned it into something else [Bb] and I think it works really well. I've tuned the pipes [F] to B-flat, 466, and I'm going to play the guitar along with them just to see how it blends. [Bb] Hope you like it. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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