The Bagpipe Society

Calls and Responses

Call

Looking at medieval images I’ve seen both bellows (being used to start a fire) and bagpipes, but no examples of the bellows being attached to the bagpipes. Please can someone tell the earliest known evidence of the use of bellows to power the bagpipes?

Elizabeth Armstrong

Call

What happens in very shallow tapering cones, where the taper is measurable but almost imperceptible? Does any amount of conicality, no matter how small, flip the one into the other? Is there a tipping point, a critical amount of conicality that is required? Or is there some grey area, where you might have some hybrid of the two? I’m wondering, in other words, if you might ever be able to make a smallpipe that retained the acoustic properties of a conical chanter? I’m sure there is a theoretical answer, but have any makers experimented with this?

Andy Letcher