BagpipeLessons.com LIVE: Buying Pipes New or Old? Black/Yellow, Waxed/Unwaxed Hemp, Dental Floss…
by Jori Chisholm, Founder of BagpipeLessons.com
Last Updated: July 21, 2024
I’ll address a wide range of topics and specific questions about practice chanter maintenance. I’ll recommend materials for keeping your instrument in top shape, and discuss the pros and cons of new versus used bagpipes.
We’ll talk about the importance of good reeds and choosing and maintaining them. I’ll answer questions about the evolution of bagpipe manufacturing and the benefits of modern technology in producing high-quality instruments. I’ll specifically address these questions:
- What’s the deal with hemp? Black vs Yellow? Unwaxed vs Waxed? Dental floss and Waxed Nylon Lacing Tape
- Buying Pipes: Should I get a new set or an old set?
- Wood or Plastic?
- How to Fix a Loose Practice Chanter?
Watch the video and scroll down to read a summary or the full video script.
Key Points
🌦️ Weather: Highlights the Pacific Northwest’s weather patterns, contrasting summer and winter.
🎶 Infinity Chanter: Recommends the Blackwood Infinity Chanter for its comfort and sound quality.
🛠️ Chanter Maintenance: Discusses the importance of using the right materials, like dental floss and pre-waxed hemp, for maintaining practice chanters.
💡 Practice Tips: Provides advice for beginners, including how many tunes to learn before getting a full set of pipes.
🤔 New vs. Used Pipes: Compares new and used bagpipes, emphasizing the benefits of modern manufacturing techniques.
🛒 Reed Selection: Recommends high-quality reeds and shares his favorites available in his online shop.
📚 Learning Resources: Promotes online courses, membership, and YouTube channel as valuable resources for learners.
🎓 Bagpipe Essentials: Introduces masterclass for mastering bagpipe techniques.
Video Transcript: Hey, everybody. This is cool. Jori Chisholm here from BagpipeLessons.com, and I am coming to live from World Headquarters, BagpipeLessons.com, which is my house. But I’m in the back garden here because the weather is amazing in Seattle this week. And I’m usually coming to you from my, “hi Sandy,” I’m usually coming to you from my studio which is inside and downstairs. And it’s cool and like a lot of yours, there’s no windows down there. So I have cool lighting and everything, but it’s just beautiful out here and I thought I would come outside. It’s been really, really hot all week, but today it’s cooled off a little bit. Some beautiful blue sky out there.
Let me know in the chat where you’re watching from in the world. We love summer here in the Pacific Northwest just because it’s some of the best weather in the world I think this time of year. But then we get a lot of rainy weather and not really freezing cold weather, but it gets pretty cold and rainy through most of the winter. So I definitely won’t be out here doing any YouTube lives in November, for example. So I thought I would go through today and just answer some more questions. Thanks everybody for sending in questions in the YouTube comments and for sending me emails and messages through Instagram and Facebook. So thanks for that. I love getting your questions and as part of my expanded YouTube that I’ve been trying to do this year in addition to doing the big edited videos and the YouTube shorts. Also I’m doing some of these lives and trying to do one every week. It’s a busy time of year and I don’t get to it every week so I thought I would just flip on YouTube here and answer some questions live.
We have Sandy Burke who’s excited to have a new Blackwood Infinity Chanter. Excellent. Welcome to the club. We love that chanter. You know you’ve probably seen my videos here on the channel. I love that Infinity chanter and that Infinity Blackwood chanter is the most comfortable chanter I’ve ever played and it’s got a fantastic sound. My favorite Blackwood Chanter.
And hi from Paperschlump in Germany. Thanks for joining us. It’s got to be late there. Thanks for tuning in live at night. So I have a few different topics I want to answer. Great. Sandy says I got it because of your videos. Well I’m glad that you got it and I hope you like it. For best results you want to get a really good reed and you want to get that Tone Protector on it. So the Tone Protector is the chanter cap that goes over the reed that will keep it at the constant and precise humidity level that you want. That’s going to go a long way to um improving your sound, the stability of your sound, and the consistency of the tuning. (We’ve got a funny um oh yeah I got some sunshine blown right into my camera lens let’s move over here there wait oh no it’s back my goodness where’s that coming from oh it’s reflecting from up there where we go let’s just do oh there we go that’s a little better um the joys of being outside in the sun)
So first topic, oh we got a question here from Officer Snap: “I’ve had my first poly practice chanter for about two months and play about 40 minutes a day.” Congratulations, you’re doing great! Then says, “All of a sudden, when I start to practice, the top part is very loose from the bottom joint. Is this normal?”
Totally normal. So I’m guessing that when you take your practice chanter apart, there’s what we call the tenon, which has got some hemp string on it. I’m guessing that’s what you got. We call that hemp, but it’s not actually hemp string. I think traditionally it might have been hemp string, but these days it is probably something like this. (This is perfect, we did not plan this in advance but one of the things I want to talk about today is different types of hemp, because that’s a big question that’s been coming up) so it’s linen thread and it’s totally normal for that to be loose. If you don’t have any hemp, you can get some dental floss. You probably have that.
Dental floss works just fine. And what you’re going to do is just put a few wraps on there and kind of push it in so that it doesn’t come unraveled. Then put the top on and it’ll smoosh it down into the hemp that’s on there. And you can just add dental floss or remove it as needed to get that nice tight joint. Some of the new chanters now, they come with O-rings. The R.G. Hardie practice chanters come with O-rings. Those are great because they pretty much last forever and you don’t need to be adding or removing. The problem with the hemp that comes on practice chanters is that it’s a linen thread. This is the unwaxed hemp and it’s a natural material. It’s linen so it absorbs moisture from your breath, or from spit, and you know it gets kind of gross. It will absorb and it will swell up, and it will get tight. Also if it dries, it will shrink. It’ll swell and get tight and shrink and get loose. Also it’ll pack down over time. I happen to have this roll of unwaxed yellow hemp. This is the only kind of hemp we used to be able to get. It’s got a piece of tape on it holding it together. It’s never been used. I never use this. I don’t know why they sell it. I think there’s some pipers who might still use it but I haven’t used unwaxed hemp in decades.
When I was first starting piping, this was the only option. My teacher had a piece of leather (I think it’s from an old leather pipe bag) folded in half and on the inside was a mixture of beeswax and black cobbler’s wax. Cobbler’s wax is like the stickiest blackest stuff that you can imagine. Like tar, but hard. He would take this unwaxed yellow hemp and (let’s see if I can unwrap it here come on now there we go and) he would take a bit of (this there we go and with) his leather folding piece with all the the wax in there, and pull it in there and pull it through. Then you would see this would just completely turn black and it would get sticky. So you were taking this yellow hemp, and you were applying this beeswax cobbler’s wax combo. And you’d have to do that for as much as you wanted to use for putting on the joint of your practice chanter or on your pipes. And it worked, but we have much better options now.
These days you can get pre-waxed temp. So this is the unwaxed, it’s a lighter quality and you can see it’s kind of like a little bit rough, you know, kind of yarny, see the little fibers there? And then this is the stuff that’s waxed. So the waxed here and the unwaxed. You should have a roll of waxed temp, this is good. It comes in yellow and black. So I’ve got black waxed, yellow waxed, and yellow unwaxed. Don’t bother with this unless you have some particular need for it, I don’t use it. As far as these two go, either way. It’s just color. I haven’t seen any difference. So they call this black waxed hemp. This is black hemp that is waxed. This is not the same black wax that my old teacher used to use. If you were to scrape off the wax, it’s clear wax. So this is actually black string with wax on it. And this is yellow string with wax on it. The wax is the same as far as I know.
So I would recommend for Officer Snap, I would say, “You could just tighten up your practice chanter joint with a little bit of dental floss. And that will make it nice and tight for you.”
Personally, I don’t use any hemp on my practice chanter or on the blowpipe on my pipes. So those are the two places that you blow directly onto the joint. So they get the most moisture and you’re going to be having problems. It’s just getting so wet. And even with the wax, the wax protects the hemp a little bit. So it doesn’t get as much moisture into it. But even with the wax, the wax wears off and it’s a natural fiber. So it’s going to get gross and you’re going to have the problems of disintegration or rotting or mildew and the shrinking and the swelling and the tightness and the looseness. I like dental floss. It actually says unflavored waxed tape. So the Reach Dental Tape, it’s dental floss. Dental tape is a little bit, maybe slightly wider than the dental floss. But what I love about dental floss is it’s pre-waxed. It’s also nylon. So it’s not a natural material. So it’s not going to absorb any water. And it’s cheap and it’s easy to use. And it comes in this nifty little case with the cutter. I think everybody should have in their piper’s toolkit at least one roll of waxed hemp black or yellow, either one, and some dental floss. So get it from your drugstore, get it from your dollar store, get it from wherever you do your shopping, Amazon or something like that. Waxed dental floss is what you want. You don’t want any of the fancy flosses that have fluoride. The flavorings are fine. There’s the type of floss that I use for my teeth, it’s almost like plastic and it doesn’t really stick to itself. So the regular waxed dental floss is fine. I used to try to find cool flavors, just kind of for fun you can get mint, cinnamon, at one point I had some bubble gum floss that was pink that was pretty cool. But just the basic Johnson & Johnson floss is what I like. So if you were to take off all that hemp off that joint and wrap it with your dental floss, wrap, wrap, wrap, it’s going to take a lot of wraps, put the top on and it’ll probably be loose, add more, at a certain point you’ll feel a little bit of tension, add more until it starts to feel nice and tight and you’ll probably feel tight. And then as you put it on, it will smoosh down the floss and compress it a little bit and you’ll have to add a little bit more. So it’s typically add some, smoosh it down, add a little more, smoosh it down, add a little more, smoosh it down. Yeah, if you have unwaxed dental floss, if you have unwaxed hemp on your practice chanter, you can either live with it, or if it was me, I would just take it off and do the wax floss. That’s a good way to go. If you’re just starting out, a roll of dental floss is fine. If you’re on the pipes and you’re going to want to be doing a bunch of this floss stuff, you may want to check this out. So I don’t know if you can see the label there, but this is ‘Nylon Lacing 500X1 Right Twist.’ This is called ‘waxed nylon lacing tape’ and it’s like dental floss but thicker. So there’s the wax nylon lacing tape there and this is the dental floss of the dental tape. So first heard about this from P/M Jamie Troy, a very famous and accomplished respected piper from Victoria, Canada. And he was showing us this at the Coeur d ‘Alene piping school years ago. And just like dental floss, but thicker. Still got the wax nylon really good. So a roll of this will last you your whole life, probably. I think electricians or people that work on the power lines, they use this, or the telephone lines, they use this stuff. Great. So unwaxed? Don’t bother. Waxed? Pick a color, get your floss, get some wax, now lacing tape. I have a video that I put up on the YouTube channel recently called Build your Bagpipes and it’s a two-part series about building a set of bagpipes from scratch from a pile of pieces into a set that you can play. There’s a link for the wax nylon lacing tape there, and it has a top-down camera view of me building these pipes including how I hemp all the joints. So that’s exactly how I would hemp your practice chanter as well.
All right, got some more questions here on that topic. “Would you recommend taking all the unwaxed hemp and replacing it with wax floss?”
I would, yeah. You do that once, it’ll be on there for forever. That stuff just does last forever.
Papaschlump says, “Can you give me a tip which reed to put in my practice chanter? I think it’s a cheap reed.”
Yeah so it depends on the type of reed that you have, and the practice chanter. If you have a practice chanter from a reputable maker like R .G. Hardie or McCallum, they come with a good reed. It’s a great quality chanter and a great reed. I have some of those on my BagpipeLessons.com Shop there are some really really bad practice chanter reeds out there and your chanter could be completely fine, but if the reed is no good, it’s not going to make a sound. It probably has a really quiet sound, and a really muffled sound. And if you give it too much air pressure, it shuts off. So that’s what happens with the practice chanter reed when you give it too much pressure, it just shuts off. So that could be a defective reed, that could be a reed that is really old, it could be a reed that gets wet as well. Sometimes when you get some moisture in there from playing, it’ll shut off. So the reeds that come with the McCallum and R.G. Hardie practice chanters are great. If you want a different reed, or if you’re looking for a new reed, my favorite reed is the John Walsh reed and those are made by John Walsh from Nova Scotia and they’re fantastic reeds. They’re really hard to get, but I have them on my BagpipeLessons.com shop and usually I buy a batch, or I order a batch, and it takes six months for them to arrive. They make them very slowly, and they’re hard to get. But for me they’re worth the wait, and if you want one you can get one right away. Just order it from my shop.
Next question from Officer Snap. “Knowing what you know, would you buy a new set or a used trusted set of pipes?”
Gosh that is a really, really good question. And when I was a young piper and I needed to get my first good set, I had an adequate set when I first started, but they were not particularly good, and they had some issues with them. They made them hard to tune and finicky. So it was time to get a new set. This was in the early 90s, and it was just as there was a change in the bagpipe world. Up until that point, anyone who wanted a good set would look at getting an old set. So Henderson’s, Lori’s, Robertson’s, something that was made decades before. But just around in the early 90s, David Nail was making new pipes. And from that point forward, there have been top players in solos and in bands playing new bagpipes. And that was kind of unheard of until the 90s. I suppose all bagpipes, even bagpipes that are a hundred years old, were new at one point. But it was just at that time period, there were not new bagpipes. I think that time from the 50s to the 1980s is not considered a great era for bagpipes. There were bagpipes. Now that’s not saying that there weren’t any good ones, but in terms of the bagpipes that people really prize for their tone, and which are reflected in the value of the pipes, would be before World War II, before World War I. But the problem with those is that they’re hard to get and they’re really expensive. So it was fantastic that there was a revolution in bagpiping where the modern technology caught up with the traditional craftsmanship.
Now you can get new bagpipes that are really, really good for a great price. And that’s fantastic. What it means is that you can choose what you want from a reputable maker and you can buy those pipes and you know that they’re going to be good and they are going to be available and they are not going to be very expensive and they’re going to be under warranty. And these modern manufacturers, like the two big ones, the two companies that make the most bagpipes in the world are R.G. Hardie in Scotland and McCallum in Scotland. Both of those companies make a lot of bagpipes and their bagpipes are really good. There’s a lot of options in terms of how much you want to spend, and the difference in what you spend is primarily going to be on the decoration. So you can get a more simply adorned set, or you can get a more ornate set and the difference is going to be reflected in the price. But the sound’s going to be the same which is great. So for that reason, the price of used pipes has really come down because unless the pipes are really really rare, and really special, most people are going to buy new pipes. New pipes have a great price, and they’re under warranty, and you get exactly what you want. So it all depends on the set. There are lots of great bagpipes out there and there are great bagpipes that are available on the used market.
I guess it kind of depends on what’s available. And you also want to know that what you’re getting is going to be high quality. So ideally you would want to see them in person. You would want them to be tested out and inspected by someone who’s knowledgeable, especially if you’re just getting into pipes and you don’t have the experience to really look them over. So in that case, if you don’t have an expert on hand, and this is maybe a long distance purchase, you’re probably better off buying a new set. You might be able to find a great deal on a used set. But especially if you’re starting out, and price, you know, money matters to everybody. If you’re in a situation where your budget is, you really want to try to get the most for your money.
There’s a set that I really, really like, that I own, that I’ve recommended to many of my students. Some as their first set, and then they get a second more expensive set later, or some pipers as a second set to have. And that’s the R.G. Hardie Precision-Made Poly Bagpipes, the Polypenco or the plastic. They’re also called Delrin or Acetyl. They all mean basically the same thing, which is: plastic. (And I’ll put a link into the, actually I’m going to pull it up right now so I can find the link here. I think it’s the zero one model. Yeah, there they are.) So this set here I’ll put in the chat. These pipes are great. They have a very traditional look. Totally plastic. No wood on these pipes at all. And I have a set, and it just has a great sound, and the price is great. I’m adding these to my BagpipeLessons.com shop. I don’t think the page has gone live yet but I’m going to be selling them through my shop. If you’re interested, send me a message through my website and I can let you know when they’re available. They’re going to be available in three different options. One is what we call “Sticks Only” which is literally the pipes themselves, three drones, blowpipe, five stocks. And that allows you to build the pipes that you want in terms of, you can get your own bag, and reeds, and bag cover, and pipe chanter, and all that stuff. I’m also going to sell them assembled (Basic), which is with the Infinity pipe chanter with the bag, with the reeds. And then I’m going to sell a third option (Premium), which is like the premium deluxe package, which is everything that I would recommend to get you started. Tone Protectors, reeds, all my top accessories. So it’s a great option. The R .G. Hardie Acetal Bagpipes is what they call them, but they’re basically the plastic model. Really, really common. I can video about those. Probably it won’t be until later in the summer or the fall, but it’s such a cool, cool thing. I have them. They have a great sound because they’re plastic. They’re basically indestructible. So I take them if I’m going to be doing a performance, a non-competitive performance, where there’s extreme weather, I’ll be playing my acetal pipes just because they can’t crack. They’re going to be more resistant to extreme weather conditions like rain or heat or cold. So definitely if I was playing in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and it’s going to be cold and rainy in March, I’m playing those. On the Thanksgiving Day Parade, or something around Christmas time, or something when it’s pouring rain. I mean, it would completely work for competition and many people have. But for me, I like having a second set of pipes. It’s inexpensive. That’s kind of bullet proof. So great, great questions, everybody. Let’s keep going through here.
Question. “How many tunes should you learn before getting a set of pipes? I heard around 10, would that be reasonable?”
Yep, that’s exactly right. Right in that range. There’s no hard and fast rule, but I think somewhere between six to ten is good. When to get the pipes? It’s kind of up to the student. It’s how much are you willing to invest? You know? But the financial investment aside, I think it’s good to have a reasonable handle on some of the basics of bagpipe music and how to play before you get the pipes. So, understanding your basic technique, having a handful of tunes that you know reasonably well that you can play with confidence and ease, having an understanding of… musicianship and tapping your foot and playing in time and keeping a steady tempo. These are all important skills and there’s no reason you couldn’t get the bagpipes first or right away.
But the practice chanter is a great tool and it gives you a way to sort of get some of those important skills down and build your knowledge and then you get the whole pipe. So what happens when you get the pipes is that now you’ve got this whole apparatus thing and the bag and the blowpipe and the chanter and the drones. There’s a lot of moving parts and there’s no way that you’re playing all this stuff that you know on the chanter on the pipes right away because you have to figure this other stuff out. And what you can do on your pipes is going to be very basic because you’re just focusing on the blowing and the squeezing and the blowing steady. How the whole thing works and the physical conditioning part of it, you know, diaphragm and lungs and your lip strength. So it’s nice to have a bunch of tunes that you know, and to have some basic musical skills on the piping side. That’ll help you get those tunes up and going on the pipes.
That being said, I’ve had students who have taken a slower approach and they’ve really waited to get their pipes. Other students, within like a couple months of getting their chanter they’re really excited and already start talking about sets and putting together a set of pipes to order. So it’s a bit of a personal choice. Check in with your teacher. If you don’t have a teacher, you know, you need to have a source for information. So let me know. Reach out to me. I started BagpipeLessons.com to have great information available on the internet to help anybody who wants to learn to play. So definitely reach out to me. And if there’s something that you’re looking for that you can’t find in my shop, reach out to me because I have connections with all the big manufacturers. I also have things that are in stock that are not on the website.
So Gail says, “I have a set of Duncan McCrae’s as a second set and they’re great.”
They are. Duncan McCrae was a famous bagpipe maker and Stuart Little was very famous for having this old set of McCrae’s that was sort of his signature sound. Stuart then worked with McCallum bagpipes to make a reproduction of his McCrae bagpipes and McCallum’s been making those. They call them the McCallum McCrae’s or the Stuart Little McCrae’s. Whatever, they’re all the same thing and they’re great. I got a set of those set up for a student. And in the time that I was setting them up with the bag and the reeds, I played them and got them all ready. And thought, “Holy cow, these are great, really great pipes.”
So the design and the craftsmanship and the materials are what make the sound, right? So you’ve got to have high quality wood. You have to have great craftsmanship and you have to have a great design. So there’s some discussion in the piping world about, how should I put this? There are some people that speak disparagingly of the big makers because they say that they’re mass producing bagpipes. Now they’re not mass producing bagpipes like they make running shoes or iPhones. I mean, still the number of bagpipes that are being made are in the hundreds and thousands, not in the millions. And yes, it’s true that these big manufacturers are using some automation and some big, computer-controlled lathes and routers and other machines to make their pipes. But I don’t see that as a negative at all. I see that as a huge positive. And the reason I see it as a huge positive is that these big companies (we are really talking about R .G. Hardie and McCallum), they’re able to make extremely high quality bagpipes at a great price. And they’re really, really consistent. So if you go back a hundred years, to say the golden, what people consider like the golden age of bagpipe making, with the old Peter Henderson or Lorries or Robertsons, those are handmade. So the consistency was not always that great. You get two tenor drones that were slightly different and you couldn’t switch the tops. Or you get warping, or you get a little bit of some strange suspect wood quality depending. So I think it’s really really great that we can get high quality bagpipes and I just don’t mean qualities for an amateur player, I mean top players that are winning the top prizes in the world are playing all types of pipes. Old classic pipes, but also new ones. So those top level pipes are available to everyone at a great price, and again because they’re new, they come under warranty. So something cracks, something warps, there’s some flaw which is very rare, they will replace it. Basically no questions asked. That’s been my experience.
I don’t take it as any kind of negative that they’re using technology to manufacture really great instruments. So I think there’s a little bit of an attitude that some people have that things were so much better in the old days, or handcrafted is always better than made with technology, and I just don’t see it that way. So the design has to be great because if you have a computer-controlled machine that’s making something out of inferior materials, or has a bad design, that’s not going to work. But if you look at every high quality bagpipe, whether it’s made by one of the big producers or a smaller producer, they are working with a world-class bagpiper, or probably more than one, to make their pipes because they need to get the design right and that goes through a lot of testing and a lot of adjusting. The other thing that this new technology in manufacturing allows pipe makers to do is to test out slightly different designs. So in the old days if you wanted to make a chanter, you’d do it all by hand, and then if you wanted to make a change to the design you might have to get new tools, or you might do it by hand. Then you’d have to see what you did differently and see if it was better. These days they can make quick changes to a drone or to a chanter simply by changing the design in the computer and then the computer produces the new model. So you can very quickly, rapidly prototype and make adjustments. You still have to have the expert that’s going to be checking for the quality control, and you still have to have the expert that’s going to be playing the instruments to see how they compare, but it’s just really a great time for bagpipes.
Yep, that’s what I’d recommend. Go with R .G. Hardie.
Dale says, “My first set are hundred-year-old Lorries and the MacCrae’s definitely stand up to the quality of the Lorries.”
Yeah, that’s been my experience. That is similar to what I’ve read about with other instruments in totally different musical traditions. I remember reading an article about really high-end violins and they did an experiment where they took world-class violin players and they had them come into a room and test different violins to see how they liked them in terms of the tone and the playability. They did it in a way that the violinists couldn’t see the violin. So I can’t remember if they did it in a darkened room, or if they had to wear special glasses that made things out of focus. But basically they couldn’t look at the violin and go, “oh, that’s a new one” or “that’s an old one.” All they could do is pick it up and play. And what this one study was showing was that the new violins performed the older violins. And these are older violins that are like Stradivarius and Guinarius violins that literally cost millions of dollars. And when people don’t know what they’re playing, they generally prefer the newer ones.
So there are great sets of bagpipes out there that are old. I know, Willie McCallum’s got his 1899 Henderson’s. There’s some very, very famous old bagpipes that have a great sound, but you can get an amazing sound with a new set as well. And that’s being proven by all of the great players today who are getting a top quality sound with new pipes. My favorite pipes, the pipes that I play are made by Dave Atherton. And unfortunately, I don’t think he’s making pipes anymore. His website has just recently gone down. Hope he comes back to it. But again, it’s matching the genius of these sort of old world craftsmen and what they know about how pipes work and acoustics and design and bores and wood quality with modern tools and high quality materials. So that’s really what you’re looking for.
Last question, then we’ll wrap it up, from RZ. “Any advice for a long time older bagpiper who hasn’t picked up the pipes for a couple of years, how to get back into the hobby the correct way?”
Well, I think what you want to do is you want to get your fingers going. So get your practice chanter around. Find that old book of tunes or exercises and start getting the fingers in shape. I released an online course in the last couple months called the Bagpipe Essentials Masterclass: The Complete Video Guide to Learn & Master your Bagpipe Technique. It’s 31 videos on all of the essentials of bagpipe technique. So going all the way back, it starts at the beginning of how to put your fingers on the practice chanter, how to keep that nice soft touch, the fingers nice and close, goes through the scale, gracenotes, strikes, all of our nine doublings and our low G based embellishments which are d throw, taorluath, grip and birl, tachums, GDEs, all that good stuff. So check that out at BagpipeLessons.com/Masterclass, type that in. Maybe you’ve got some old books of exercises and drills you can work on, so it’s getting the fingers going. The other thing you’re going to need to do is check out your pipes if you haven’t played in a long time. Depending on how long, maybe you need to replace some of the equipment on your pipes. It also could be that there’s some great new options out there for equipment that you didn’t you don’t have that wasn’t available last time you were playing. I would look at a modern bag. I’d look at getting a modern chanter with some modern reeds. Check out my Tone Protector Moisture control system and the Dri-Flo Bannatyne Lightweight Bagpipe Moisture Control Canister Drying System. So there’s a lot of great stuff out there. Again, check out my youtube video. It’s a two-part series called How to Build Your Bagpipes on the Youtube channel. And that goes through me building a set of pipes from scratch, and you can see some of the products that I recommend, why I like them, and then there’s links for where to get the stuff.
This has been really fun. Thanks everybody for tuning in live and for your questions. This is super fun. I’m going to keep doing this. I’ve got some travels this summer, but we’ll do it as often as we can. Check out my Bagpipe Essentials Masterclass for all the fingering techniques. Subscribe to the channel here and that way you’ll get updated every time I add new videos to the channel. I’m working on a new video all about steady blowing, one of the most highly requested topics and one of the biggest mysteries. An important skill that every piper needs to know about. So working on a video all about blowing steady and all the top mistakes, the most common mistakes that pipers make, and how to avoid them and fix them to get your blowing really steady. Tell a friend, if you like all my videos, just click the share button and send it to a friend. I make these YouTube videos. I do these live streams to help you enjoy your piping and make progress and find more meaning from your piping. I started BagpipeLessons.com 25 years ago with the goal to help anybody, anywhere in the world, fulfill your dream to be a piper. So check out my website. If you really want to be part of my Inner Circle, I do weekly live Zoom classes. So not like this where I’m talking to the camera, but actually a Zoom call where we all get to speak to each other and interact. I do those almost every week and I have a lesson library with hundreds (I’m not sure if it’s thousands yet, but many many hundreds) of tunes, lessons, videos, free guides, product demonstrations on almost every piping topic. And that’s a paid membership. It’s called the BagpipeLessons.com Inner Circle. And you can visit that by going to BagpipeLessons.com/membership/. So we’ll type that in there. Yeah, so check that out. I’d love to have you in my Inner Circle. People are joining. We’re getting new members all the time, getting pipe bands signing up. If you’re interested in signing up for your pipe band, we have some great discounts for pipe bands. If you go into my BagpipeLessons.com shop and you click on the Inner Circle, there’s a link to the pipe band membership page. It’s really huge discounts on that. So if you’re looking for a way to help motivate your members or just to support your members, to give them resources so that they can be everything they can be, and also help your pipe band, check out the Inner Circle membership for bands. Well, that’s great. That’s all I got for today. Thanks everybody. And if you’re in the middle of competition season, I wish you the very best out at the Highland games at the championships. If you’re getting ready to go to Scotland for the World’s, good luck, bring it home, as they say, all the best and keep in touch.
Happy Piping and Mahalo.
Secrets to Make your Pipes Easy to Play
Pipers enjoy playing more when our pipes sound and feel great. Master your instrument with these powerful and quick tips based on my 30+ years as a piper and teacher.
quick tips
