Promoting the Bagpipe Revival since 1986
The Bagpipe Society
The Groeswen glove: Or how to make a really nifty bagpipe for less than £50
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A Word of Thanks
We would like to thank all the contributors to this issue of Chanter and extend special thanks to André de Vries and Buddy Wells who have worked behind the scenes on typesetting and paste-up.
Peter Stacey
The Groeswen Glove — or how to make a really nifty bagpipe for less than fifty quid
About five or six years ago, I was heavily involved in a really nice early music group called “The Dunstable Consort”. I also had a lovely recorder group at school and was looking for ways to extend them. Along came a musical instrument called a Cortol. It was described as a copy of the medieval instrument, the Kortholt. It was a wind-cap instrument, with fingering very similar to the recorder. It sounded ideal so I ordered two.
Unfortunately, little lungs do not make good wind-cap players. They turn purple in the face and collapse. The two cortols languished in the cupboard whilst I toyed with the idea of turning them into a bagpipe. First of all I tried an old Tesco carrier bag. It worked but the crinkling sound was off-putting. The cortols languished for a few more months and then one night whilst doing the washing-up, a vision came to me. Why not use a rubber glove for the bag. And so Mark 1 was born. It was too hard to mouth blow, so I used an airbed foot-pump. The two cortols came out of the fingers, one of them have most of its holes blocked up with Blu-tack to provide the drone. Tuning was murder but when it was in tune, it sounded as sweet as a nut. It’s gone through quite a few changes but I think Mark 7 is pretty good. This is how to make one.
The Manifold device or stocks
Take a four-inch piece of drain-pipe. Stand in it three four-inch pieces of plastic pipe, the sort used for central heating and toilet overflows. Also, two four inch lengths of copper micro-bore. Fill up the spaces between the pipes with plastic casting resin, the sort that you get from craft and modelling shops. Don’t fill the drain-pipe right to the top. Leave about an inch of the pipes showing. When the resin has ‘gone off’ create a valve by sticking a small square of rubber (from a rubber glove of course!) along the edge of one of the micro-bores. Super-glue is great for this job. The valve fits on the flush end of the stock, not the end with the protruding pipes. Now I’m sure that was as clear as mud but rest assured, that’s the hardest part.
The Glove
Only one type of glove appears to work well! Luckily, this is the type that I first used, otherwise I would probably have given up on the project a long time ago. It can be found in Spar shops under the Spar rubber glove label, or in old-fashioned ironmongers where it is called a Span glove. Get a large pair in yellow; pink looks silly! Connect it to the stock with two large jubilee clips.
The Drone
I have only one drone but I’ve got blocked-up tubes where I could plug in a few more. I use aluminium tubing from a model shop. It’s the sort that is normally used to go around the drive shaft of a model boat. I have three pieces, one with a circumference of 1.9 cm and two with a circumference of 2.1 cm. Fit a cortol reed into one of the larger pieces. Wind some carpet tape around the pipe until the drone fits into one of the large pipes in the stock. Connect this piece of pipe to the other large piece using a small piece of rubber tubing. Slide the smaller piece of tubing into this piece. It slides up and down to facilitate tuning. Thus you have a drone pipe with a flexible bend in it. It may interest you to know that if you put the end of the drone in your mouth when you’re playing and kind of wobble your mouth à la jew’s harp fashion, you get a bagpipe with a rhythm section! Try it with your pipes some time! Just for now block up the other two large tubes in the stock with wine corks.
The Pump
Use a standard Li-lo foot pump, the all-rubber type. The plastic type gives more air but it’s too noisy. You have to add some rubber tubing to the pump, otherwise it’s not long enough to reach from the floor to your arm-pit.
The Chanter
As I mentioned before, it’s a cortol, from Musica Ltd., 27 Fore St., Topsham, Devon. It’s a really nifty instrument as it has a doubled back bore like a bassoon, thus giving it a range of nearly two octaves and fully chromatic! Don’t forget to order a spare reed for your drone. Link it to the only obvious place left on your stock with another piece of rubber tubing and a little ingenuity.
Playing
Tuck the stock firmly under your left arm, pump slowly with your left foot, tune in, turn on and away you go.
Phil Edwards
Duda, Duda, Day…
‘There’s no such thing as Polish bagpipes,’ said my Polish friend with an air of finality. ‘Why then,’ I countered, ‘does the stamp on this letter you sent me show a picture of some?’ Faced with such irrefutable evidence, he promised to investigate and he got home. Some months later he returned bearing a bag of bits and pieces. ‘I got you these,’ he said, ‘and I’ve heard a tape of some being played, they sound horrible.’ Some things are the same the world over!
The result of assembling these bits is shown in Fig. 1.
[Drawing labeled “ASSEMBLED BAGPIPE” Fig. 1]
Figure 2 shows the individual components which will be considered in turn.
Chanter
The chanter is quite roughly made from stained, rather poor quality wood. The fingerholes, 6 + h (according to Baines’ nomenclature) are ungraded in size, but are all steeply slope-cut towards the reed end. Two vent holes lie terminal to the fingerholes and are followed by a tenon which fits into a huge ‘horn’, made from wood and bound with brass sheeting. It is possessed of a chain, although no obvious point of attachment on the chanter exists for it. The chanter reed is a single beating reed of cane which sits well down in the neck. The stock is in the form of a stylised goat’s head and is let into the top corner of the square, sewn vinyl bag.
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