Workshop: Dave Shaw

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WORKSHOP

In this, the third article in a series in which makers describe the instruments they make and discuss their philosophies of bagpipe design and construction, Dave Shaw writes about his approach to making instruments from the Northumbrian tradition.

About ten years ago, when my real interest in bagpipes began, I knew everything. I still do — but not quite so often as before.

I was living in Bangor, North Wales, playing melodeon in Irish sessions in the city — lots of good music and singing. Really I was interested in the Irish pipes and had tried my hand at reed-making, using 1" diameter bamboo out of a carpet roll. You’ve got to start somewhere. It was a total failure.

Anyway, I’d heard Small-pipes on the Billy Pigg record, and a friend had a set, which looked impossibly complicated to an unfamiliar eye, and which no one could play.

These gradually drifted away, but my chance came when another friend, venturing from South Georgia in the Antarctic, turned up with a derelict set of Small-pipes he had found in Port Stanley in the Falklands. No reeds, all the leather-work rotten. I swapped them for a concertina and so the rot set in for me.

Having obtained a copy of Cocks & Bryans Northumbrian Pipes book, I re-reeded the set using my big bamboo and some flower canes from Woolworths. The bag presented problems as I had no leather about. I was able to get some rubber latex, so doped up a piece of calico (very cheap) and glued it up into a bag. It worked beautifully, and was the origin of the bags I normally use on my bellows pipes now.

I must have begged some leather from somewhere, but having mended the bellows I was off. A working set of pipes — almost.

I decided to make a set to see if they were any better — using C & B. I made and almost finished a set of Small-pipes, but the idea of an even better set of F pipes palled. After all, the sessions were in D or G.

I wrote to Joe Crane, the then technical adviser to the Northumbrian Pipers’ Söciety, for advice, and eventually received a faint pencil sketch of a chanter and a recommendation not to make my first one out of ivory. No dimensions of any sort; a start though.

I made my first chanter from boxwood, seven brass keys Catalin mounted. Quite a nice piece of work. It ran a bit sharp of F#. I made my second chanter from rosewood. Seven brass keys, Catalin mounted. A nice piece of work. Overall a bit smaller. It ran a bit sharp of F# Neither could be coaxed any higher. Go smaller I said. I made my third . . . . . . . . F##.

They do say that the seventh wave goes furthest up the beach. In my case I needed spring tides as chanter No. 7, rosewood — 7 brass keys, still worked just short of G. What kept me at it, you ask? I had made seven chanter sticks, 49 brass keys and got nowhere. Perhaps I have never had a sense of failure.

Up to now I had always used my 1" bamboo as a reed making material, as I’ve always tried to solve my problems with what was to hand rather than wait for the real thing, which you can’t usually find anyway.

Then!! I was given a bit of reed cane. After the splitting and baleful characteristics of bamboo it was a delight to handle. I made a reed, and tried it in my boxwood chanter (No. 1 if you recall). And it worked! In G! Really well! I fitted it with bag drones and bellows and in April 1979 it was finished — somewhat cut up and glued down but it worked.

I won the Beginners and Intermediate sections of the Newcastle Small-pipes competititons in October that year on that set. I was playing for up to seven hours a day. Sweet bliss of unemployment.

Being me, I had to find out why they worked. After careful measurement of my G and such Fish sets as I could get, I drew a series of long wobbly curves on graph paper. Not very informative, so I adapted the axes. The x axis became notes spread out like frets on a guitar and the y axis length in cms. The lines became straight, going through the origin and so I could derive formulae.

It all added together to show that the little finger G length is around 20.2/20.4 cm. All hole positions can be gauged by the fret formula (work it out for yourself — I did), to ideal positions and then rearranged practically by varying the hole sizes and positions to suit real fingers.

Early on I started drilling the C hole (bottom hand — top finger) at an angle to give 2 mm extra clearance from the hole below — no mean thing on so small a chanter. I do this on all the pitches of Northumbrian Small-pipes I make now. It’s just a habit but I like it.

My first G chanter, and this early work, settled the characteristics of my chanters, the slim bodies with steeply undercut holes and square-cut key-blocks. The G chanter is 11/64" bore and 3/8" diameter in the body. F is 3/16" bore and 13/32" diameter in the body. So the body is just over twice the bore diameter. It’s a bit harder to fit the double keys to this narrow body but I find the sound good on it.

Reeds can be quite a problem, mine being thinly scraped at the tip, on a flattish staple, but wide-mouthed at the end. They give a full reedy tone, useful in sessions or bands, and it is this environment that has shaped other aspects of my pipes.

I used to use a fore and aft bag, like many others, but in a crowded pub it gets in the way, and you can’t sit back into a chair. In a band, to use a microphone you have to set it a long way down. Having seen a French tear-drop type of bag I thought “that’s it” and made one for my pipes. It was just what I needed, raising the chanter to a prominent position to be heard in a session, or miked in a band, and leaving no long projection behind the elbow.

The same with the loud drones, minus the “traditional” piston valve, which to my mind spoils the sound of a drone.

So you see, all I had done so far was to build an instrument which suited the peculiarities of the conditions in which I played. I suspect that Darwin would have been proud of me. The Galapagos Pipes.

Chanter 17

The drones themselves have seen much scrutiny — graph drawing and the like, and have suffered from the smoke screens that practical and scientific work put up. I found one of these when I measured the wave length of sound, in still air, in small bore tubes — from 3/16" downwards. This was done using a sliding piston in the tube, to vary the length, with a pitch fork at the end of the tube to excite the air column. All this had to be conducted at the dead of night, to ensure the necessary sensitivity of the ears to the resonance of the air in the tube. Basically, you adjust the piston until you have maximum volume and resonance in the air column. Measure the length and there you are. Do it enough times and calculate the average. In practical terms, the results were disappointing, in that working dimensions of instruments are generally 35/36 ths shorter than the measured lengths would suggest. I don’t know why, so I’ve ignored it and stuck to the practical measurements. Is it all a waste of time? How does it affect design — say on drones?

The drone I generally use is put together as follows: if the pitch of the note required is calculated for length in free air, then you divide that by 4 to get the working length, and drop it down in keeping with the bore of the tube you are using — L cm.

The open end of the drone comes to L cm, ignoring end correction. I now use what I call a tuned bottom end, where the top of the stand is tuned to the fifth of the drone, i.e. 2L/3. The bottom of the reed socket I place at the second octave of the drone L/4, and place the free end of the reed at L/8.

The way I work out the top of the slide normally seems to be L/√2. A strange figure you may say, but √2 does seem to crop up several times, especially in bagpipe design.

There is an anomaly, in that the wide section of the slide doesn’t work in the same way as the rest of the drone and you have to calculate for that, but the essentials for setting up the small parts are:

Figure 1

(image of a drone with labeled parts: L/8, L/4, 2L/3, L/√2, L)

L/4 is the least critical of these, the others contribute to making a harmonious sound with strong harmonics. Setting it this way means that say a D drone has its sound strengthened by its fifths, A, and if tuned to E on a bead, the E is strengthened by its fourth — A.

That’s one way of doing it. The Missionary drone? Don’t do it if you don’t know what the ‘L’ I’m talking about.

The thing is that my rules work for me. I’ve avoided the normal texts on musical acoustics, because unless you take your own way in these matters, you can be led by the nose into ideas which seem valid, but because they are couched in someone else’s terms they won’t work for you. I’ve gone my own way with these things.

Shuttle pipes arrived when I wanted a tough instrument to take tree felling with me. A normal set would have quickly been broken in the van, so shuttles offered an ideal solution for a lunchtime practice instrument. The first one was in F, based on Cocks & Bryan, eventually given away and subsequently stolen. To re-align it down to D with an open chanter was not much work, and I ran my first one up to take to Newcastleton festival a few years back. It’s a nice instrument for Scottish pipers as it has a thick BASS sound.

Now I can do it with a range of keys for semi-tones and to extend the scale upwards. A kind of English Musette. I’m not a purist. If I can make an instrument to someone’s specification then I will whether it exists in a museum or picture or not. I make pipes and I make them for people. They all have different needs.

Half-longs and Bagpipes have had less detailed attention until now, but I have made some good instruments in this style, and now have reasonably formalised ways of designing them.

The problem is that I can’t sit still on an idea, and really it has cost a good deal of time, material and, by default, money to work on all this stuff.

Like Jon Swayne, I need to be in the workshop, making pipes and earning a living, but if at the end of it, I have a deeper understanding of the principles behind making pipes, in practical terms I can be a better maker and my customers can benefit. After all my instruments have their own bright and very distinctive sound. Delving into the physics behind it hasn’t taken any of it away.

Dave Shaw

Chanter 19