(01:08) So that’s the bass drone there. It’s got the imitation ivory ferrules, which are these rings. It’s got the imitation ivory ring caps up here. Um, give me a bagpipe. Somebody wants to say, “Okay.” All right, there we go. Okay, comes with the AdjustiStick adjustable length blowpipe, which is great. It’s got the built-in valve. There’s the bottom section of the bass drone.

(02:11) So when you buy a set of pipes, you can buy what’s called “sticks only,” and the sticks only is what you get in this box here. And the sticks only is three drones, a blowpipe, and five stocks. So the stocks are the pieces that attach to the bag. So what “sticks only” is, is when you have a set of bagpipes, this is the part that never changes typically. Some people swap out their blowpipe, but everything else you will change over time. Things are replaceable. Drone reeds wear out, the pipe bag needs to be changed every few years, the cords of course, all the reeds, and even the pipe chanter itself. Pipe chanters are evolving rapidly, and there are new models and new designs that are better that keep coming out. So you will see pipers that play a set of pipes that are really, really old. There are some pipers who play bagpipes even from the late 1800s, like Willie McCallum’s got his 1899 full silver Hendersons, which are a famous set of pipes. But other than the drones and the stocks, and probably the blowpipe, everything has been changed out, even the pipe chanter.

(03:26) All right, so there’s your “sticks only:” the chanter stock, the blowpipe, and the blowpipe stock. Here’s a tenor drone in the stock. There’s another tenor drone. Try to not knock these over. And here is your bass drone. Yeah, so that’s what you’re getting when you get the “sticks only.” And R. G. Hardie has a cool little feature where they put “R. G. Hardie & Company” and then the year. It says 2024, so that’s down there. Now let’s find a way to put these all on here and not knock everything over.

(04:14) Okay, so first thing we need to do is we are going to install the five stocks into the bag. This is a Bannatyne hybrid bag. Hybrid bags are the most popular bags in the world because they combine the best features of the synthetic bags and the traditional bag. So a traditional bag would be made out of leather—sheepskin, cow leather. I guess in Australia they even had kangaroo skin bags. So any kind of leather. And traditionally, that was the best option. Leather is airtight—reasonably airtight as long as it doesn’t dry out—and also breathable. So then synthetic bags came around. I think in Australia they had the Ross bag, which was a rubber bag, which was very airtight but not breathable. And then we moved on to breathable synthetics like a Gore-Tex type material, and the original Canmore bag was green, and I think it was actually name-brand Gore-Tex. Then somebody came up with this brilliant idea of having the synthetic bag on the inside, but the leather on the outside. So it’s actually two layers, and we call this a hybrid bag, and it’s fantastic because it has all the benefits of the synthetic bag—meaning it doesn’t dry out and lose its airtightness, it’s very breathable—but it’s got this leather outer layer, which has a traditional feel, and pipers really love this bag.

(05:36) This is my favorite bag, the small Bannatyne hybrid with the zipper. They come with two—they have two models: one has a zipper on the side, this one is a zipper on the bottom. I like the zipper on the bottom because when you’re playing, your arm just touches the leather here. For me and for some other players, the side zipper presses right on your forearm there, so that’s no good.

(06:05) Another advantage of these hybrid bags is that they’re quite easy to install. The old leather bags, you actually cut holes in the leather, and you’d push the stocks through, and you would tie it on with string. We call it “tying on a bag.” It takes a lot of skill, a lot of muscle, and sometimes it’s hard to do it right on the first try. But with these grommets it’s real easy. You’ll see, I’ll do this here in a minute. You just push the stocks from inside the bag and push them out. Takes a little bit of force and elbow grease, but it’s hard to mess it up, and these are very strong.

(06:35) So let’s make a little bit of room here. If you’re putting on a new bag, it’s a great time to also install a moisture control system. So my favorite is the Dri-Flo. This also comes from Bannatyne, a moisture control system. There are different versions out there, but essentially what they do is they filter out the moisture from your breath before it gets to your reeds, and this has really revolutionized piping.

(07:10) So you can imagine as you’re playing, you’re blowing air into the bag to inflate the bag. So then you can squeeze the bag with your arm to increase the pressure so that air goes out all the reeds and the pipes. That’s how the sound is created—blowing into the bag, maintaining pressure with the arm on the bag, and then the pressure pushes the air out through the reeds. And you get the three drones going, and you get the chanter going. The chanter reed, the pipe chanter reed, is made from cane. It loves moisture—right, not too much, but it needs some. The cane, that great sound of the bagpipe chanter, requires that you have a good high-quality cane reed that has the right amount of moisture in it. And that goes for all woodwind instruments—clarinet, saxophone, oboe, bassoon—they all have that cane reed that needs some moisture. That’s why my Tone Protector humidity controlling chanter cap is so popular, is that it allows you to store your reed in that precisely chosen constant humidity level. And also my Tone Protector reed case. So they stay in there, and they stay at a constant humidity level. So that’s a huge innovation that really helps with your chanter sound.

(08:14) But the drones, they have synthetic drone reeds in them—lots of different drone reed options out there. My favorite is the combo set from Ezeedrone, and they have plastic tongues and some sort of synthetic or synthetic hybrid body, and they don’t want moisture. So you have a situation where the chanter reed wants moisture. It wants that foggy, warm, damp—you can think of it like a tropical jungle sort of environment—it loves that. But the drone reeds want to be warm and dry. There’s no amount of moisture that is beneficial to your synthetic drone reed. So what we have ended up with here is a system that goes in the bag and filters the air before it goes to your drones, and that’s what the Dri-Flo does.

(09:18) So this tube here is going to fit inside the bag. You won’t see it when you’re playing. And I’ll show you how this is going to work. So this is the tenor drone stock, one of the tenor drones. And Dri-Flos come with this nice little cup thing. It’s got a little bit of a lip there, and that fits perfectly into the groove of the bottom of the tenor drone stock. There it is. So that holds on there. And then when this is installed in the bag, this part is all inside the bag. You can’t see it. When you install the canister, it just holds in there nicely. There’s no way for any air to get through here—this is all sealed—so the only way for that air to get into the stock (and remember the drone is attached here with the reed, the reed is going to go here), so the only way for air to get into this tube to create the sound is if it passes through this canister, this tube, this Dri-Flo canister.

(10:35) So there’s a mesh here, so there’s little holes and air can travel through, but these silica gel beads do not fall out. So this is inside the bag, it’s filled with damp, moist, hot, steamy jungle air from your breath, and when the air travels through here, it has to travel through these little silica gel beads or rocks. And by the time it gets to the other end, it’s had the moisture removed from it. So if you ever see those little packets that come with electronics or with a new pair of shoes—it looks like a sugar packet or something, says “Do not eat”—that’s silica gel. And silica gel does a fantastic job at removing moisture and water from air. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to install these cups on the bottom of each one of the drone stocks. So that’s the outside tenor, there’s the middle tenor, and there’s the bass drone. There we go.

(11:11) Now these cups hold on there pretty well. I like to do one little extra step, which is I like to put one wrap of electrical tape here onto these cups so that they don’t fall out. Depending on the make of your pipes, some pipes have a wider stock at the bottom, which means those cups are a little bit tighter. Other sets of pipes are a little bit narrower, which means that it might not be quite as tight. So I like to do some electrical tape. This is this nice, nice and thick, or nice and wide two-inch electrical tape. Get that on Amazon, and I just do one wrap around here. Yep, until it overlaps, and then slice it off. I’ll do that to all three stocks.

(12:01) If you are watching live, just put a comment in there, say where you’re from, if you’re a piper, if you play in a band, if you’re playing on your own, if you’re competing, introduce yourself. All right, so perfect time to put in your Dri-Flo system is when you’re putting in a new bag.

(12:46) All right, so the Dri-Flo system also comes with some extra rocks. These are silica gel beads, and it’s indicating silica gel. And what that means is that there’s a chemical that’s added to the silica gel that changes color when it comes in contact with moisture. So orange means that it’s dry, and you can see that these canisters are—they’re transparent, and they’re orange in there. And when it gets used up, it turns green. So that’s kind of a cool feature. You can actually peek at them, and you can see, when you play these over hours and days, you’ll see that the color will start to change. And that’s a really cool feature. So we’ll just put these over here.

(13:29) Okay, so the way that we install the drone stocks, it’s real easy. We can take the—I’ll start with the bass drone. And the bass drone is closest to your body. So the bag’s on your left side under your left arm, and the stock that is closest to your body is going to be the bass drone. You can kind of muscle it in there dry, but I like to use a little bit of water here just to make it a little bit slipperier. These rubber grommets—it’s like a collar that squeezes on the drone and keeps it in place, and they are really tough and really strong. I have never seen one of these break or tear. The early, early Canmore Gore-Tex bags, we’re talking back in the late 80s and early 90s, there were some issues there, but Bannatyne has definitely solved that issue.

(14:03) So just a little bit of water in there. I don’t like to use soap or any kind of grease or lubricant anywhere on my pipes, although that would make it real easy. Okay, so now I just have the narrowest part, the top part of the stock, just centered in the hole. And then I just push down on it. Yep, you can see it pops. And that sort of popping sound is as the grommet slides over these beads and the combing and the beading here on this stock. All right, that’s pretty good. Going to pull a little bit harder. This is the process—really tight. And what I’m feeling for inside is I want—when I push it all the way in, I want this top part of the rubber cup here to be pushed all the way in so that the surface of the bag is right here and there’s no gap. So that’s what I’m feeling for on the inside.

(15:15) It just takes some elbow grease here and a little bit of force, but these bags are extremely strong. I’ve never had one fail in this process. All right, so now I can feel it’s all the way in, tight and snug and flush on the inside. Okay, one more little tug. Just really tight. Great.

(15:57) Okay, next I’m going to do the middle tenor. Start with some water inside, put the stock inside through the zipper, and get it lined up. See it there? And then I’m just using my body weight and pushing down on the table. If you’re doing this on a nice table that you don’t want to get scratched or dented, I’d, you know, maybe lay down a towel or something. There we go. So what I’m doing, I’m pulling and rotating it. I’m sort of pulling it down on both sides. At a certain point, it doesn’t go anymore. Yep, now it must be there. I can feel the inside. Yep, one more little tug. That’s good.

(17:04) Hey Dan from Texas, thanks for tuning in. So we are building a set of pipes from scratch. I’ve done the bass drone and middle tenor, and now I’m just adding a little water to the inside of the grommet here. Do the outside tenor through the zipper. So I’ve got some other videos on my YouTube channel on this process. I did a two-part series where I built a set of pipes, videotaped it, and sort of edited it. This is different because I’m doing it live.

(17:47) I also have a video all about pipe bags and pipe bag sizes. I think most people, if they’re playing the wrong size pipe bag, it’s because they’re playing a pipe bag that’s too large. So it totally makes sense that you would think that whatever the size is on the label of your shirt or your other clothing, that that might be the size of the bag that you play. But it doesn’t quite work that way. Nobody should be playing a large bag. There are people out there who like it, but I would say it’s because they’re used to it. There’s no advantage to a large bag. But there are lots of advantages to a smaller bag. And the advantages to a smaller bag are you can keep your arm in closer to your body, you’re not way out here. Also, you can get the bag up higher into the armpit, which gives you more leverage. It doesn’t slip down. A smaller bag will allow your forearm to be freer. A larger bag will be compressing your forearm and makes it harder to play those top-hand embellishments like E-doublings and that sort of thing. So lots of advantages to a smaller bag. I love the small bag. Another popular size is the extended small from Bannatyne. There’s also a Willie McCallum size. Willie is a great piper, and he had a custom design bag that he made with Bannatyne. It’s like a medium in the back but it’s narrower in the front. So this part here has been cut away. So it’s almost like a small in the front and a medium in the back. And very popular size bag, and Willie designed it so that the forearm is cut away, so your forearm is nice and free.

(19:24) Okay, two more stocks to go. We’ve got the blowpipe and the chanter stock. Now wait, before we do the blowpipe stock, I’m going to add the tube trap. So the Dri-Flos do a fantastic job at removing almost all the moisture from the air that goes to the drones, and we want that because we want our drone reeds to be warm and dry. The Bannatyne pipe bags also come with this bottle and tube trap. So how this works is that this is going to attach to the bottom of your blowpipe stock. So imagine I have my pipes here and I’m blowing in. Without this tube, my blowpipe is going to be pointed directly at my pipe chanter reed. And not only is it going to be getting that warm, damp air blown directly on it, but also spit and spray. It’s going to get too wet.

(20:04) So what we want to do is we want to put on our tube trap, and this means that when you blow, the air travels through this corrugated tube. And this is not a sealed bottle, there’s two holes here on the top. And what the bottle does—see, without the bottle, you can imagine like this would help a lot. So the bottle is going to divert the air to the back. So any kind of spray is going to hit the back of the bag, and you’re not going to get all those droplets and drool and spit going directly on your reed. But still, there’s a lot of liquid that’s going to spray out. So what the bottle does is it’s like a physical trap. And you can see there’s two holes here on the top. So we screw that in. Now any of that spray is going to be caught within this bottle. The air can still travel, but the air goes down here, and then the spray catches in the bottle, and then it gets absorbed by this white, which is like a chamois kind of absorbent cloth.

(20:38) If you play one of these, you probably notice that this tube can get kind of funky and gross. Well, what do you expect? You’re blowing spit into it all day long. So probably a good idea to wash this once in a while. You can take this apart, you can take out the cloth and throw that in the clothes washer, or you can actually throw it out and get a new one. But before we put in our blowpipe stock, I want to attach this here.

(21:08) So this is just going to have—it’s going to be like a hemp joint, but instead of hemp, I’m going to use waxed nylon lacing tape. So this is like dental floss. It’s pre-waxed, it’s made from nylon, so it does not absorb water, which is good because if you use hemp—we call it hemp string, but it’s actually linen thread—it’s a natural material. It’s also quite absorbent. Even with wax, the wax breaks down, and it absorbs moisture, and then it dries and it shrinks. So it gets tight and loose depending on how much moisture is in there. And it rots, and it’s just really gross. Nylon doesn’t do this at all.

(21:37) So I’m just going to do some wrapping here, and what I want to do is get a nice tight fit for this tube to go into the bottom of my blowpipe stock. So I don’t worry about lining up the wraps at all. I just do some wrapping, and then as it pushes into the stock, it compresses it down a little bit. Need a little bit more. I will put a link in the description here of where to get the waxed nylon lacing tape. It might already be down in the description. I’ll have to just check that.

(22:18) Good, I can start to feel it getting tighter. That’s good. All right, but as it compresses down, it gets a little bit loose. So this is like dental floss, but it’s thicker. So sometimes it needs to be a little bit tighter, but not so much that it needs a full wrap of this. So that’s when I’ll use my actual dental floss here. Do just a wrap there. Okay, that is good. I want it to be nice and snug so it doesn’t fall out when I’m playing. There we go. Right, so that is good.

(22:58) So that’s going to be inside the bag. We’ll install the blowpipe stock. Okay, again a little bit of water here. By the way, if you need help identifying the different stocks, there are five stocks. One of them is the longest—that’s the bass drone. Then there are two which are identical, and those are the tenor drones, they’re the next tallest. And then you have two shorter ones. The shortest is the blowpipe. So blowpipe, the shortest. The next short one is the pipe chanter. We’ll do that last. Then you’ve got the two tenors, and then you’ve got the bass.

(24:46) So this is the last one that we’re going to do with this grommet situation where we really press on it. There we go. Great. Okay, that one snaps in nicely. There we go. Now, well, we won’t put everything in the bag yet.

(25:32) Okay, now we will put the tube in and the Dri-Flos in just a minute here. But last, now we need to attach the pipe chanter stock. This one, just like—sort of like an open sleeve here of material, does not have a grommet. So it attaches in a slightly different way. And when you get your Bannatyne bag, you’ll get this baggie, and it has three things in it that are important. It has a little tube that looks like a mini toothpaste tube, and this is lubricant for your zipper. We’ll do that in a second. And then it has an O-ring, and it has a clamp.

(26:12) So this is how I do it. The O-ring goes onto the groove of the chanter stock. So there it is, you see that? Now the way it’s going to go is we’re going to insert this into the bag, and then we are going to put the clamp over the bag, and the clamp is going to—we’re going to tighten it down, and the clamp is going to compress the bag material around the stock really, really tight.

(26:50) Hey everybody, if you’re just tuning in, Jori Chisholm here. I’m building a set of pipes from scratch live, so put a note in the chat there. If you’ve got any questions about this whole process, I’m sure that people do this differently than me. I’ve done this a lot of times, and just sharing what works for me.

(27:22) So you would think that the way that this O-ring is designed to work is that you put this in the bag, and then the clamp goes directly over the O-ring and clamps over it. And I know some people who do that, but that has not worked for me because you can see this O-ring doesn’t really want to be flat, and it’s hard to get a great seal there. So tell you what I do: I actually use the O-ring as a guide, and the O-ring helps me find the position where I want to have my clamp, but I actually have the clamp just below the O-ring like this. And I’m actually going to use some electrical tape here to give a bit of cushioning on the outside of the stock.

(28:07) So here’s how I do it: just wrap—I don’t know, probably going to do at least 10 wraps of electrical tape here. Great, good. So quite a bit. And here’s why I do this. I do this because the metal clamp is not stretchy or cushiony at all, it’s very hard. The hard plastic material of the stock is also not very cushiony. So what this does is this acts like a gasket. It gives a little bit of, um, squish and kind of springiness to it. So I’m going to—when I tighten the clamp down, it’s going to push on the pipe bag material, which is going to push on this tape layer that I’ve built up on there. In fact, I’m going to add a little bit more. I just want to have a nice solid wide foundation for this clamp to sit. Great. Okay, that’s going to work fine.

(28:44) So then what’s going to happen is this clamp is going to squish into the bag, which is going to squish into this tape and get a nice wide seal, like a gasket. Okay, so we slip the stock in. There we go. Now you have a little bit of room for how deep you want this to go, so I’m probably going to go an inch and a half in. If you’re a shorter person, you could push the stock in further, or if you’re taller and you want it to be a bit longer, you can pull it out.

(29:24) Now again, there are these little tricks that I figured out over the years, and one of the things that I like to do is put a little bit of electrical tape on the outside of the bag also for some additional cushioning, and also just to protect that leather material from that hard metal clamp. So a little bit of electrical tape on the outside here. Great. Okay, so we have on the inside, we got the stock. Then we have some tape, then we have the pipe bag, and then we have more tape. And now we’re going to put the clamp. Need to loosen this clamp a little bit more. Okay, good.

(30:14) So I’m just getting the clamp in the position where I want it on the bag, and getting the stock in the position where I want it inside the bag. I want the clamp to be—excuse me—perpendicular to the stock so it’s not at an angle. Also want the screw where I’m turning it on the back.

(31:12) B’s got a question: “What suggestions do you have if you’re struggling to get the stock of the drones in fully?” Well, you saw what I did there. I put a little bit of water on the inside—that helps a lot. The other thing is to—you just really gotta use your body weight. And this is a place where I’ve heard from some pipers who, like you, maybe can’t do it physically. This is somewhere where a non-piper friend, family member, someone who’s got a little bit more strength in their hands maybe, maybe a little bit more body weight, can help with that. So essentially what I’m doing is I’ve got the hole with the grommet, and I’ve got the stock here, and I just need to find a way to push that bag down. It would be extremely hard to do it just by hand. I’m using the tabletop with the stock on the table, and I’m using my hands and pushing down with my body weight, essentially.

(31:42) Okay, so I’ve got the clamp lined up perpendicular to the stock. I can feel the O-ring is just here below, so I know I’m in the right position. Everything’s lined up, the screw part’s in the back going along the seam. Now you can use a screwdriver. I have a, uh, this is a nifty little thing. It’s got a crescent or adjustable crescent wrench on one side, but it’s got a—this is just a socket wrench thing—on the back. And tighten it down. I can feel it compressing down, getting tighter. I don’t want to overdo it, but it’s definitely—it’s tight, but it’s squishing down the leather, it’s squishing down the bag material, it’s compressing that tape gasket that I built up on there. It’s starting to get real tight. That is great.

(32:24) Okay, nice and snug. Okay, so one of the things that you get in your pipe bag is this little—it’s called TiZip or Tizip, and it’s lubricant for your zipper. How about that for something that you didn’t know you were going to own: zipper lubricant. So this is a really amazing piece of technology. This is an airtight, watertight zipper. And we’re all familiar with zippers on clothing, but most of our zippers are just designed to hold two pieces of fabric together on your pants or your jacket or whatever, and they’re not airtight. But what we have here, we have the same type of zipper technology that you’re used to, but it really pulls in tight. And inside the little teeth of the zipper is a rubber, a flexible rubber material, and on both sides it’s there. So when the zipper comes together, it pushes those rubber things together, and it seals it. So it’s really pretty amazing. You have this ability to have a zipper that’s airtight and watertight.

(33:12) So you don’t need this lubricant to have it be airtight. It will be airtight on its own. But what this does is this reduces the wear and tear on your zipper. You’re opening it to get into your Dri-Flos, maybe you want to open it up to let some air get in there after a long practice or after a performance where it’s gotten wet in there. But it’s pretty tight because of these rubber—these little rubber strips in there between the teeth. It’s way harder to pull than your normal zipper. You can see it’s got this nice handle. You can really yank on it. So what this lubricant is going to do is it’s going to make it easier to open and close, and you’re not going to be tugging so hard on the seams and tugging so hard on the zipper.

(33:46) So what I do when the zipper’s open is I just take a little dollop, maybe the size of a small pea, and just—I just put it right in between—right on the top of the zipper slider there. And then as I slide it, yep, it spreads itself out. Do that a couple times. Right away I can feel that it’s a lot easier to open and close, and that’s it. This should last you the lifetime of your zipper—of your pipe bag, that is. And I keep—I probably do this, I don’t know, every six months maybe. I don’t really do it on a schedule, I just do it if I notice that my bag is getting a little bit hard to pull. I will add a little dollop there. Great.

(34:20) Okay, so now we’re ready to put everything inside the bag. So we’ve got our cups that have been attached to the bottom of our drone stocks, and we will install these in there. One. And these are all identical. There isn’t a special one for the bass drone or everything. There’s some other moisture control systems on the market that use a desiccant. The most famous one, the first one, is the Ross canister from Jeff Ross in Australia. Fantastic, used by a lot of pipers. I like—I played that for years. I like the Dri-Flo. It’s lighter, it’s smaller. I also find that the, um, oh, I got to do the tube also. The orange silica gel really works well, works really, really well, and is extremely effective at removing moisture from your air.

(35:02) Okay, so this one goes in the bottom of the blowpipe stock. And you might think, “Oh my gosh, there’s so much stuff in there.” No problem, there’s plenty of room, even a small bag. And when you’re playing, you don’t even know it’s in there. It’s just hanging out inside your bag. It has a little bit of weight, but pipers—you’ll get used to this, no problem.

(35:32) All right, so next thing you want to do is blow up this pipe bag and make sure it’s airtight. So I’ve got rubber stoppers. We put them in the three drones and the chanter stock for now, and then we’ll fill up the blowpipe. Here’s another pro tip for you: never use waxed hemp on your blowpipe. I have not used waxed hemp on my blowpipe in years. Now this came nicely hemped, but I’m going to just put this aside, and I might save this hemp because it’s brand new.

(35:57) This is the wettest part of your bagpipes right here. You’re blowing in here, and even though most of the moisture is going down, you’re going to get some moisture that gets into this joint here. And if you’re using waxed hemp or unwaxed hemp, that’s going to get really gross really fast. I remember seeing a friend who had just done a great job of re-hemping this blowpipe joint, and within a day it was starting to rot already. So, um, I use—again, you can use dental floss or waxed nylon lacing tape. I’m going to use the lacing tape because it’s thicker and I’ve got plenty of it.

(37:17) We got Stuart from Scotland: very wet Scotland. Well, it’s very wet here in Seattle also. All right, so again, what I do is I just do a couple wraps. Okay, that is good. Trim that off. Put that aside. So this AdjustiStick from R. G. Hardie—it’s a great blowpipe. It’s got a nice big bore, which means it’s very comfortable to blow through, it’s not restrictive. Some of the older sets of pipes, they had quite a tiny bore, and I can see why they would do that, because the wider the bore gets on the wooden blowpipes, um, the thinner the wood gets. And this is a very—this part of the bagpipes is the part that, since it gets so much moisture, it’s most likely to crack. So not an issue of cracking with a plastic blowpipe. So a really nice bore.

(38:31) And then this part here unscrews like a knurled sort of a locking—sorry, it’s like a locking nut. And then when you loosen that up, this whole thing can slide out. Here we go. So this part here slides in and out. You can lengthen it, and then what you do is you just screw it back in to tighten it, it locks it in place. Or you can shorten it. I’m going to shorten this down because I’m going to play it, and I like a nice short blowpipe. So there you go.

(39:00) Also has a very cool feature that the valve is inside here, which is fantastic because it’s a very nice large valve that is protected. And the way that it works is this hemp part actually unscrews. The typical blowpipe is just one mouthpiece part, one blowpipe part, and then the valve is on the outside. But in here, this hemp part unscrews, and it reveals the valve inside. And you can see it’s a rubber valve, our normal flapper valve, but it just sits in there. So this is a great feature. Just got to get it lined up properly so it works. There we go. Lays nice and flat.

(40:00) And I heard from my first teacher, Collin MacKenzie, that sometimes he would play without a valve, and that some of the old-timers used to do that. I can’t even imagine trying to play my bagpipes without a valve. So when you’re blowing into the pipe, the valve, it flaps open, and the air can go in, and then when you take a breath, the air pressure from inside the bag snaps it shut like a self-closing door, right? But really fast. Without that valve, as soon as you take a breath, air comes shooting out the blowpipe, and your bagpipes would just stop functioning immediately. But what he would do—what I guess the old players would do—is they would block the blowpipe with their tongue. Works, but I suppose we could all figure it out if we had to. There’s plenty of other harder things that we’ve figured out, but my gosh, the valve is fantastic.

(40:40) Okay, so nice and snug here on the blowpipe. We got our three stocks, our zipper is closed nice and tight. Let’s see if it’s airtight. There we go. So the way that I like to test the bag to see if it’s airtight is I blow it as full as I can. It’s like so hard to blow any air. It’s like I can’t get another molecule of air in there. Then I just squeeze on it, kind of lean on it, push on it. Try that again. Can’t do it. That is great.

(41:48) Now some players say, “Oh, I like to inflate my bag, and I want to see how that blowpipe—if it sags over time.” I’m not worried about over time. This will definitely lose air over time, but what I’m worried about is: is it holding air in the short term? And it’s very airtight. Okay.

(42:37) Okay, another comment: “When I first put my pipes together, I thought I’d pushed my chanter stock too far, but I found that I was unable to push it back once it was installed.” Well, all depends on the type of pipe bag. The leather bag, because you’re tying it on and you’re using bag seasoning, which is this goop that seals all the little cracks and leaks, it can kind of glue it in there. At this point, with a hybrid bag, if you undo this clamp, you ought to be able to move this in and out. Maybe it’ll be a little bit kind of stuck on there, but there’s no way that this thing is going to hold without the clamp.

(43:11) Great. Okay, we are in good shape. I’m going to just give another little twist here on this clamp. That’s nice and tight. Great.

(43:17) Now there’s one other thing that I like to do—again, because I want my pipes to be airtight and efficient without having any worries. So what I’m going to do is I like to put a wrap of electrical tape over the grommet here. So these grommets are very tight, they’re very airtight, but over time you can maybe get a tiny bit of leakage in there. So I just do a little bit of electrical tape and just wrap it around. So I use the wide stuff, but you can use the narrower stuff, you just have to do multiple wraps. But I’m just covering the gap between the top of the grommet and the stock.

(44:30) One of the things that you will learn is that there are a lot of uses for electrical tape and dental floss in the bagpipe world. In fact, it’s kind of become a little bit of a running joke in my household, which is, you know, between electrical tape, dental floss, and super glue, you can fix pretty much anything, right?

(44:46) Okay, any of you pipers ever lose a button on your piping jacket? You know, you got your black jacket or your vest with the little silver buttons. Well, any time—I’m going to get rid of this water here before I spill it—any time I lose a button, I sew it back with dental floss. And yeah, it’s maybe a little bit overkill, but I want to know if I’m going to sew that button on that it’s never going to come off again. And that is definitely something that dental floss will help with rather than the little, you know, kind of weak black string that they used back in the shop where they build these jackets.

(45:09) Okay, so that’s the three drones done. Let’s do the blowpipe stock. We got another comment here. Okay, yeah, so the Gannaway bag, full hide with the zipper, right. Okay, here’s a little trivia question for you—or maybe it’s not trivia, but a bit of a historical whatever. I used to play a Gannaway bag. Now these are hide bags made in New Zealand. Back when they first came out, and before they offered one with a zipper, I put a zipper on mine. I actually built one at home. I cut a slit in the bag, got a zipper from an old Ross bag that had a zipper, and glued it in there, and may have been the world’s first zipper hide bag. Okay, and it worked great.

(45:49) I don’t know why people play hide bags with zippers though, because I haven’t been able to prove that there’s any advantage to the hide material compared to the synthetic hybrid material. And people have all sorts of theories about the effect of various bag materials on the tone. I actually heard from one famous piper who actually believed, and maybe still believes, that there’s sheepskin molecules inside the bag that bounce around and hit the chanter and change the tone of the chords. I just don’t see the mechanism for how that could work. Now certainly the amount of moisture that’s in your pipe chanter reed is going to affect the chanter sound. But a bigger factor would be the setup of the instrument and how the reeds—the instrument and the reeds and how they’re set up—and the blowing steadiness of the piper. Obviously, those are going to be the bigger factors. The moisture content in the chanter is also very important, but I haven’t seen any evidence that a specific material of bag is going to have a significant advantage or detriment on the sound.

(47:15) So I think that the advantages of the hybrid bags are just so significant. Okay, and what’s my evidence for that claim? Well, this is my evidence for the claim, which is if you look at the very best bagpipers today—and you know who they are—the bagpipe sound that they get today is better than the bagpipe sound that anyone has ever achieved, ever in the history of the world. So all these great players—you know, Donald MacPherson, Donald MacLeod, John Burgess, and even going back to the more recent past of the 1980s and the 1990s—the amazing sound that these pipers achieved is inferior to the sound that the top players get today. So what are the top players doing today? They almost all play hybrid bags with synthetic reeds like Ezeedrones, and moisture control systems. So that’s sort of my argument there. It’s not that it was better in the old days, it’s that it’s actually better today, and it’s because of technology.

(48:14) Great. Mark is saying, “I’ve got my first Bannatyne bag.” Fantastic. You’re going to love it. And Mike is saying, “Hi from Illinois.” Hey everybody. So if you’re just tuning in, Jori Chisholm here, BagpipeLessons.com. I am building a set of bagpipes right now. So we have done kind of a lot of the hard part here, which we’ve got the bag installed, got the moisture control system installed. I’m just going to put a piece of tape over this metal clamp. These metal hose clamps work really, really well. They’re not super cozy, you know, they’re kind of sharp and metallic and a little bit harsh. So I’m just going to wrap some—a few extra wraps of electrical tape over this thing, and it’s all going to be covered up with my bag cover anyway, but nice and padded there. Great.

(49:26) Okay, so what’s next? Well, let’s revisit our parts list here. So we’ve got… Okay, great. Let’s get the drone reeds set up. So the most popular, best-selling, trusted drone reeds in the world: Ezeedrones. It is not always the case that the product that is preferred by the world’s best is also the best-selling product. It’s not always the case. You can imagine that, you know, the most popular car for the masses is not the most popular car for race car drivers. But in the case of bagpipe drone reeds, it is the case. Ezeedrones are by far the most common and popular drone reed played worldwide by players of all levels. They’re also preferred by— they’re preferred by top players in the world.

(50:30) So this is the Ezeedrone regular set. This person who’s getting these pipes, they actually got two sets. This is the standard Ezeedrone set: two tenors and a bass, the classic, trusted, this kind of dark brown color with the clear tongue, black rubber band bridle, black screw. These are fantastic, and these are going to be the spare set for this customer.

(51:07) A few years ago, Ezeedrone announced a new set of drone reeds that had increased absorption. And I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” You know, Ezeedrone is very well known and very well trusted, and this is like a significant innovation or a significant announcement for them that now we’re making this new set of reeds for increased absorption. And if you look at the reeds—let me come closer here—if you look at them, they’re different color. So this one here is the standard (focusing), and this one here is the new one with increased absorption. So it’s a lighter color, and it’s also inverted. See, the tongue goes backwards. So very cool.

(51:44) So the idea is that as moisture builds up on the reeds, that instead of building up on the surface and interfering with the tongue and, you know, being bothersome, that it will get absorbed into the body material. Thought, “Okay, that’s interesting idea.” But my first thought was, well, I don’t care about that because I got my Dri-Flo system, I got my orange indicating silica gel rocks, and it is gonna suck all the moisture out of the air before it ever gets anywhere on my drone reed, so I don’t care about it. So I just kind of dismissed that innovation. I thought, well okay, maybe it’s for some people who play—they don’t use their moisture control system.

(52:27) But then I was in Scotland, and when I’m around pipers, I’m always curious to see what pipers are doing in terms of what are they using for drone reeds, what are they using for chanter reeds, bags. I want to—you know, the equipment is important. And especially when I hear a piper who has a great sound, I want to ask them, “What are you playing?” And that year in Scotland, I heard from several pipers who said that they were playing the new Ezeedrone bass reed with the increased absorption, and they really loved it. And I said, “Well, what about the—who cares about the increased absorption if you got the moisture control system?” They said, “Yeah, I don’t care about it either. I use the Dri-Flo or I use the whatever, but it’s actually a better bass drone reed. It has a better sound. It has a deeper, richer, fuller sound.” So I thought, “Okay, interesting. I’m going to have to try this bass reed.” And they said, “Well, what about the tenors? How do you like those increased absorption tenors?” And several of these pipers said, “I actually like the classic, older-style tenors better.” I thought, “Well, that’s also interesting.”

(53:30) So everything matters when you’re talking about sound and sound production—everything about your instrument and the materials and the manufacturer and the construction and the design and how they’re set up and how they’re maintained—everything affects the sound. So I came home from Scotland, I ordered the increased absorption ones, and I was testing to see what my experiences were, and this is what I found out. I found, through my testing, that yes, the new bass drone reed from Ezeedrone with the increased absorption was better, and the classic older-style tenors were better. So like, boom.

(53:59) So I reached out to Ezeedrone and said I want to sell these to my students and put them on my shop. “Do you make a set that has the new bass and the older tenors?” And they said, “Yeah, we don’t do that.” I said, “Well, would you do it for me?” And they went kind of back and forth. They said, “Fine, we’ll do it for you, but you have to order like 40 sets,” or whatever. So that’s what we got. It’s called the Ezeedrone combo set. You can get it on my shop. Can’t get it anywhere else. It’s the increased absorption bass with the classic tenors, and you can see here it’s got the darker color on the tenors and the lighter color on the bass. So we’re going to get those going now here.

(54:34) All right, now this is cool. This is something you may not have seen, but a lot of the newer pipe chanters have a threaded reed seat, which means you put the reed in there, and if you want the reed to go a little bit deeper because you want to sharpen your top hand, you can just twist the reed and the screws will actually, as you turn it, go deeper. And you can unscrew it and it comes out. Very cool feature. We don’t need threads in the drones for tuning, but the threads are very handy for keeping that drone reed in there securely. If you’ve ever had a drone reed fall into the bag, or you check it and it’s a little bit loose, having a thread in there will totally solve that problem.

(55:03) So these are not threaded, but I’m going to do that now. So the way that a threading tool works is you have what is called a tap, and this is essentially like a metal screw that cuts the threads into the material. So what do we got here? All right. So you can see here—in fact, I might just come forward to let you see this—so the inside of the drone is just smooth in there, and this is a tap. And what it is, is it’s like a metal screw with these little grooves cut into the side. So as it turns, it’s like the leading edge of this threaded—it’s like a blade that’s going to cut these threads in there. Comes with a little tool like this handle. There it is.

(56:10) So I’m just going to turn this in there, and because it’s like a screw, it’s going to turn into the drone. I have it marked with a piece of tape. That is the depth of the part of the drone reed that goes into the stock, so that’s the same length here. Doesn’t need to be any longer than that. It’s a little bit shorter because I don’t want any threads to be affecting the airflow inside. So I put it in, turn it, and I can feel it. It’s tight. It’s starting to grab. It’s getting tighter. And then when I reach as deep as I want to go, I stop. Then I’m going to go back and forth a bunch. What that does is it just like—I can feel it cutting a nice smooth thread in there.

(57:02) We got a question here: “Are these Blackwood pipes or poly?” These are poly. These are the plastic ones from R. G. Hardie model P01. I have these on my shop. I’ve been selling bagpipe stuff for years but just recently added the full sets of pipes on the website, and a lot of takers. Amazing. I wasn’t sure how many sets of bagpipes I would sell, but a lot of orders.

(57:35) Back and forth. I will put the links to the sizes of these tools if you’re interested in doing this. You may need to buy a set of these because depending on the set of pipes that you have, the bores are all different. Nothing in the bagpipe world is—most things in the bagpipe world are not standardized.

(58:13) All the little plastic dust. Okay, let’s go do the other two. That was the outside tenor. Now let’s do the middle tenor. Do it over my waste basket so the little pieces don’t fall out on the floor. Back and forth. I will put a link in the description. Perfect.

(59:02) Now for the bass drone, it’s a different tap because it’s a larger bore. Yep, this is the one. So again, I’ve got it marked with a piece of tape, my tool in there. There we go. Okay, so Mark is saying a guy in our band did this for quite a few of us who also had nails like his. Yeah, I had nails. Don’t anymore. All right, so this is good. I can really feel it biting in there. It’s really important that you get the right size because if it’s too loose, you won’t really get proper screw threads. And if it’s too big, it’s just going to be really tight, and you can force it in there, but you run the risk of actually splitting your bagpipes. So you can actually split your bagpipes if the tap is too big. As you screw it in, it’s going to grab and start to force its way in there, but it’s going to split the wood apart. Don’t want to do that.

(1:00:29) So getting the right size is important. All right. Yep, all the little plastic dust. Okay, great. Beautiful threads in there. Okay, so I’m done with these. I don’t know, I’ve probably done this to at least 100 sets of pipes over the years. Okay, don’t need that anymore. Cool.

(1:01:25) So now, what are we going to do here to get these Ezeedrones in? So Ezeedrones come with this nice little black—it’s like shrink wrap, really—like a gasket. And I don’t like the fact that it doesn’t go in very far. I want this drone reed to be all the way in. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m actually going to remove that little gasket on there. Somewhere I think I had a little knife out here, but I’ll just use the tip of my scissors here.

(1:02:03) So let me show you—I’ll just come forward for this part—and show you what I’m doing. So if you look here, we’ve got the—I’m not happy with that. That has no hemp on it or any floss, but it doesn’t go in far enough. So I’m actually going to remove this gasket thing. Use a box cutter here, and just slice this thing off and just peel it right off. Try to get it started. But it’ll come off. Here we go. Okay, now I can see. I can just peel this thing right off, right. So that whole thing comes off, a couple pieces.

(1:03:07) All right, so that thing, that just goes right in the garbage. And now you’ll see it goes all the way in, plenty, plenty deep. So now I’m going to grab my dental floss. You can use your waxed hemp for this too. I’ll show you. I’m just going to wrap it on here. I like the dental floss because it’s thinner, right. So nice wrapping, then let’s test to see how it goes. A little bit more. All right, so now I can screw this in nice and tight, so it’s nice and deep. And because it’s screwed, it’s in there. Look at how tight that is. That is what we like. Boom.

(1:04:02) Okay, so now let’s do the tenors to get started here. Tear it off. All right, if you’re watching, tell us more. Tell where you’re from, what kind of bagpipes you’re playing, what kind of drone reeds you’re playing. Have you tried the new increased absorption Ezeedrones? How about moisture control systems? What are you playing? Got the Dri-Flo, got the Ross, something else we haven’t talked about?

(1:05:11) There we go. So there’s one tenor clear. The other one. Anybody disagree with my claims that the hybrid bags have a better sound than sheepskin? I know it seems like it’s a controversial topic in some circles, but what I would say is that a lot of people who prefer that sheepskin sound—I’m not saying it’s not a great sound—but I would say for most people, the advantages of having a hybrid bag in terms of the maintenance and also the ability to have a moisture control system, the advantages are just so huge that that’s what I recommend for people.

(1:05:51) Okay, good. So now I got the two tenors are clear, got the little rubber bits taken off, and we’re going to put those all back together here. There we go. Nice and snug. Trim off the extra. If you’ve ever been told, or if you’ve ever had the little tails of hemp—some people would, uh, yep, don’t need a tail.

(1:06:55) Yeah, so a lot of these things are real easy to test, right. So there’s this theory out there which says that the rubber grommets affect the sound. And there’s also the theory that, oh, the canister systems affect the sound. And that’s a real easy experiment, because you have two tenors. So you could real easily have your Dri-Flo attached to one tenor and have no Dri-Flo on the other tenor and see if you can tell the difference, or see if somebody else can tell the difference. And you can’t.

(1:07:47) I played a sheepskin bag for many years. I play in the SFU Pipe Band, you know, we won the Worlds. We were famous for that cane drone reed and sheepskin sound. So I was very excited when I got a sheepskin bag with a zipper because I thought, well, this is it. You’re going to have the amazing sheepskin full, rich, wet chanter sound, but then your drones will stay in tune. And the amazing thing that happened was, as soon as you put that canister system inside the pipes, it changed the sound of the chanter.

(1:08:25) So this is actually a really important thing that people don’t think about in this whole discussion about sound and bags, is that more important to the sound—more important to that sheepskin sound or that natural bagpipe sound that people love (although I don’t recommend it because your drones are going to get wet and go out of tune)—the bigger difference there is not the material of the bag, it’s the fact that they don’t have tubes in there.

(1:08:56) So anybody can try this right now at home. If you have a moisture control system, get your pipes going, play for a while, play some nice long slow tunes—piobaireachds or slow airs especially. Listen to the high A, listen to what the high A sounds like, your top hand. Now if you can disconnect your bass drone canister or tube, if you can do that easily—if it’s a Dri-Flo, just pop it off—then play again. You will notice that your top hand sounds different. You’re going to get some more, um, what’s the word—it’s going to be a more vibrant sound on the high A. And what that is, is it’s the sound of the bass drone interacting with the chanter reed. And then you can put the tube back on, you see the high A goes back.

(1:09:35) Here’s another thing you can do if you don’t have a canister system, you don’t have anything in there. Play for a while, do the same thing. Play some slow notes, some slow tunes—piobaireachds, slow airs, whatever—especially on the top hand. And then while you’re playing high A, shut off your bass drone. And you’ll see that when your bass drone is shut off, the sound of your high A totally changes. So that’s a really big impact on your overall chanter sound, is the drones—in particular, the bass drone—interacting with your chanter sound.

(1:10:00) So that’s kind of my argument to why having a natural leather bag with a zipper is—doesn’t matter, it’s pointless. Because as soon as you—the zipper is there so you can put tubes in there and you can put a canister system in there, but as soon as you do that, it changes the chanter sound. So the advantage, the so-called advantage of sheepskin or whatever, is basically gone.

(1:10:41) Let’s put the cords on. So let’s clean up my table here a little bit. Okay, Ezeedrones going to go away. This is a spare regular set. This is the empty box from the combo set with the increased absorption bass. Also, you can try another experiment. You can try the hide bag with and without grommets, and you can see if there’s an effect on the sound. And there’s not, right. I really should just order a Bannatyne bag. Bannatyne used to make a bag that didn’t have grommets briefly, and I found that there’s no difference there. I know that Gannaway has a grommet bag and a non-grommet bag. I know the same thing with some other makers. And there’s just no audible difference that you can tell between that. You could try it right now. If the grommet somehow made a difference, if you have a non-grommeted bag, you know, wrap some leather around here or wrap some rubber around it, or put a clamp on here, or wrap a sock around it, or any kind of like tight thing that would mimic the effect of having a grommet on there, and see if it changes the sound. I’ve tried those things, and I can’t tell any difference.

(1:11:38) An important thing to keep in mind is that how it feels to you as the player and how it is perceived to someone listening to you is different. So for years I played a Kinnaird bass reed, and I really liked the vibration and sort of the depth that I got out of that bass drone sound, and played with Ezeedrone tenors and for various different reasons, and one of them being this new increased absorption Ezeedrone reed, I switched over to that reed. And I switched over to Ezeedrones, and the feeling to me as a player was that I was losing something in the sound, because I was used to that very, almost harshness of the Kinnaird. And I got only positive comments from listeners and from judges when I switched over to this Ezeedrone bass. And I thought, I’m really, I was really prepared to hear comments from judges that see that first summer competing with the Ezeedrone bass that, “Oh, this is too quiet,” or “Oh, the bass drone is weak,” or whatever. Zero comments like that. In fact, all the comments were super positive that they love the sound.

(1:12:09) Mike says, “Do you find that wearing multiple layers between the bag and your arm interferes with the connection to the bag?” What do you mean “connection?” That’s a good question. Let me know what you think about that.

(1:12:49) In fact, I’ve done some tests with using a sound pressure meter, which is a device—now they have them on your iPhone—that measures the volume. And it’s really weird because you can blow in a drone, you test—I was testing different drone reeds, right—and you can blow a reed in a drone, and it can sound quieter than another reed, but the app is actually showing you that it’s louder. So there’s all kinds of funny acoustic and psychological things that can happen.

(1:13:25) So you just have to be aware of that. I know for sure when you go from a non-canister system to a canister system, your pipes feel different. They do feel like they vibrate differently. I’ve been playing these canister systems for so long, when I play one that doesn’t have it, I feel like the blowpipe is vibrating. I feel like it—I feel it in my teeth. But that is not something that you hear on the outside. So I think sometimes people think, “Oh, when you do the, you know, you play a canister system, it changes the sound in all these negative ways.” It’s like, well, it feels different because it’s vibrating differently, but what’s important is the sound. That’s the important thing. Who cares if your teeth vibrate when you play, right? Personally, I don’t like that.

(1:14:20) Back to Mike’s question: If you’ve ever played in a uniform that has multiple layers of stuff, it’s harder, right? So when I was playing in the band, we would—you know, you have your dress shirt, and then you have your waistcoat, which is a vest, which has an outer and a liner, and then you have a jacket which has an outer and a liner, and then you have the pipe bag cover. You have at least six layers of material. It’s definitely going to affect it. What I recommend is you have a bag cover that’s snug on your pipe bag so that doesn’t slip around. You want all your piping uniform to be as fitted as possible. I use Dycem, a non-slip material, on both sides of my pipe bag so it sticks to clothing. That helps a lot.

(1:15:02) Anyway, let’s do the drone cords now. So we got black silk cords. All right. While I’m doing this, we got a question about easy drone tenor reed changes. I think I’ll get to that after the cords.

(1:15:43) So the cords go on the drones, and this person has ordered black silk cords. You can tie them in with string or needle and thread, but the way most people do it now is with these little cable ties. So I always start on the tenor side and work my way towards the bass. Because if you do have some extra length, you can take it up at the end with some extra knots, but on the tenor side, you just want to—so I do it about five inches here and line it up, tighten it down nice and snug here. All right, there we go. Tighten it down good. So these cord guides here on the drones, so the cord sits in there. You want the drone to be able to turn so you can tune it but not slip out. So I’m going to pull this nice and tight so that it doesn’t fall out.

(1:17:04) Dan says, “When I first put my pipes together…” We covered that. Great.

(1:18:20) If you’re just tuning in, we are putting on the drone cords now. I’m using cable ties. Trim off the cable ties, careful they go shooting off.

(1:19:26) All right, so now there’s some different thinking on how you want the spacing here. I like a pretty close spacing. If you look at photographs of these old army pipers from World War I, even more recently, you’ll see a huge spacing here. Drones are way spread out. I think the problem with that is that it starts to pull off your shoulder. So with a lot of things in the world, ergonomics are improving, and I think one of the ways you can improve your bagpipe ergonomics is to have these drones a little bit tighter in, so they’re closer on your shoulder and they sit more vertical and they’re not pulling off. So I’m going to say about—well, let’s grab a ruler here and see if we can figure it out. So I’m going to say about five inches between the drones, maybe six inches on center. Let’s just try that. Actually, on center it’s a bit close for six. Let’s do seven inches on center. Seems about right to me.

(1:20:38) Measure twice, cut once. We’re not cutting, but once these cable ties go on, they don’t like to be moved. Okay, what are we doing…there. Yep, that looks about right. Okay, seven inches, good. Okay, cool. Nice and snug on the other side. Trimming off the ends. All right, there we go.

(1:21:11) Looking good. Mark says Dycem is awesome. All NFL receivers use Dycem-covered gloves. That is interesting. I did not know that. I wonder how they deal with wetness.

(1:21:43) So now on the bass, we want it to look centered. So we just kind of eyeball it. The bass drone does not have a cord guide on the bottom, so we just kind of eyeball it. That looks about right, centered. Okay. All right, so that looks pretty good right there. Boom.

(1:23:04) Now for the top, we bring the bass drone cords up to the top here, and we use the cord guide. And then again we just kind of eyeball. We want to have a little bit of dangle. We don’t want this to be super tight because we want to be able to take the top section apart and have enough slack there. So that’s good. So I’m going to say—and I just want these to be equal length, or sorry, equal—yeah, so they’re sagging but they’re equal. Okay, good. That looks good to me. Nice and tight there.

(1:24:21) Not you young folks, but people that are my age and older, you’ll remember a time before the internet. Now you just need these little tiny black cable ties, hop on Amazon, have them the next day. Didn’t used to be like that.

(1:25:02) There we are. Nice spacing there, nice little bit of… Now we got this long thing here, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to tie a knot here. In fact, I might tie a couple knots to just take up some of this slack. This is always the part where I have to try to remember exactly how I do it. In fact, I think I got a drawing here that I made. Yeah, there it is. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’ll post a link to that drawing. But essentially what you want to do is it’s kind of a slip knot, just a simple overhand knot that looks nice and pretty, that takes up some of the slack.

(1:26:12) So I’ll go under here, go over the top and under. Yep, simple, there it is. And I still got plenty of slack, so I’m going to do another one. There it is. Okay, so now I’ve got two beautiful little knots here, and this just kind of slides up and down, and it’s taking in some of this extra slack. Boom. Okay, looking good. Put these together. Should we see how they sound?

(1:27:15) Oops, got twisted up, stop in here. Any questions so far? All good.

(1:28:21) [Music and blowing pipes]

(1:29:26) That’s amazing! But this is the modern world of bagpipes. That’s literally the first time these pipes have ever been played. I didn’t adjust the Ezeedrones, and look, they’re tuning exactly where they should be—about a quarter inch of hemp showing here and here and here, and two fingers width down there. That is amazing. Now, of course, that’ll change a little bit when we get the pipe chanter going, but boom, what a deal.

(1:30:17) Now, I forgot, we need to install one more thing here, and that’s my Perfect Angle Blowpipe Positioner. So this is great. So you’ll see what this looks like without it. I’m going to blow up, and I’m going to let go of the blowpipe with my teeth and see what happens to the blowpipe. Try that again. It pops out.

(1:31:05) So we’re going to put in the Perfect Angle Blowpipe Positioner here. So what this is, this is a product I invented which allows you to adjust that angle. I put a video on the channel pretty recently about that. And what it allows you to do is just adjust that blowpipe so it sits right in this perfect spot in the center of your mouth, and you can relax your teeth, you can relax your jaw, and it just stays right there.

(1:31:41) So it has three parts. It’s got these two rings with the straps that attach to your bass drone and your middle tenor stocks, and they’re going to push all the way down the bottom of the stocks. And then this one here, with the two buckles, attaches to your blowpipe. And by pulling those—the bass drone and the middle tenor drone strap—you will be able to bring that blowpipe towards your mouth and adjust the angle. So that’s how that’s going to work.

(1:32:34) Start with the bass drone. Again, it’s nice and snug, so you just gotta use a little bit of elbow grease to get that thing way down on the bottom here. Use the strap for help. There we go, right. So it’s all the way at the bottom here. And when you have your bag cover on, you never even see it. So it’s a set-it-once-and-forget-it kind of situation. Put the middle tenor ring on. Boom. These things can really take some good tugging. I actually had to improve the design. The first batch of these I was underestimating how strong of a force it was going to be put on here with some people and their setup. So we had to beef it up and increase the layers and the amount of stitching on here.

(1:33:35) Okay, now we get the blowpipe one on. Great. Okay, I think we’re almost there. Yeah, so now you see everything’s attached, but we haven’t hooked up the straps yet. Let me show you what that looks like. Yeah, so there you go: bass drone, tenor drone, and then the blowpipe one. So then we hook up the—feed the straps through the buckles. You know, this is just like the buckle you have on your backpack straps. You just pull on one side and it shortens them up. All right, there’s one. Do the other one.

(1:34:35) People really love this product. You might think, “Really, a blowpipe thing?  Another one of Jori’s gimmicks?” Well, if you ever buy anything that I’ve invented and you think it’s a gimmick, I want you to let me know, and I will give you your money back. Because I’m not interested in selling stuff that’s gimmicky. I’m interested in selling stuff that really works. So there it is. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to tighten that up. I love hearing feedback from people. If you use one of my products and you like it, I want to hear about it. Post it somewhere, tell a friend. Pipe Major Kenny MacLeod is one of the two guys who runs McCallum Bagpipes—very well-known, respected innovator in the bagpipe world. He loves this thing. He loves his Perfect Angle.

(1:35:08) I can hardly stand to play a set of pipes that doesn’t have one, because I’m so used to being able to relax my mouth. And without this Perfect Angle, it just wants to pop out. People will say, “Well yeah, well you just need to tie in your bag properly.” It’s like no, you don’t. There’s nothing you can do anything about a hybrid bag. It’s just, you know, everybody’s body is different, and they don’t make custom pipe bags for every single person’s height and dimensions of your upper body. So the bag works great, you just need to be able to pull this in. So that’s how this is going to work. In fact, I’ll just do it with corks here.

(1:36:33) All right, so right now it’s already better. If I pull this in a little bit more, that’s pretty good. Look at that. Now it’s a little bit different because this stock is normally going to be up here. So let’s just put the drones in now. Whoa, I’m gonna move this cup of water before I knock it over.

(1:37:17) [Music and blowing pipes] Everything’s shutting off. I’m blowing a little bit too hard. But there you go. Look at that, right there. Great.

(1:37:39) Dan is asking, “Do you recommend scraping or sanding to get a new chanter reed to play a little bit easier?” If you would have asked me 10 years ago, I would have said yeah, for sure, and also pinch it. Today, I don’t do any of that, and I’ll show you here in a minute when we get into the chanter reed.

(1:38:18) Okay, so we’ve got our Infinity pipe chanter. Love this chanter—my favorite pipe chanter from R. G. Hardie. I’ve got a video on it on my channel. It comes with a traditional black chanter cap with a hole, which you can throw out or use as a paperweight or whatever, because you will not be using it, because what you want is the Tone Protector Chanter Cap. So this is my biggest selling product, and people love it because it allows you to keep your reed at the right humidity level. So there’s a pink one.

(1:39:19) Here’s how this works: Unlike the regular chanter cap which only protects the reed from physical damage, the Tone Protector protects the reed from physical damage and also keeps it from being damaged from changing humidity, typically too dry. So it’s got a hygrometer, which is a digital thing that reads the humidity in there, and it comes with—that pops off—and it comes with a couple of these humidity packets which keep it at the right humidity level. Some people use one packet. I recommend two. These are nice and soft. I can feel the water in there, it’s like a little jelly kind of stuff. These packets are made out of a breathable material, and the way it works is that these are pre-calibrated to 84%, which is the ideal humidity level for bagpipe reeds. No matter where you live in the world, the reed loves 84%. If you get too much dampness, you get mold. The reed gets kind of cloudy and mushy sounding, and it shortens the life. And if the reed gets too dry, you get sharpness, you get chirping, and you kill the reed.

(1:40:00) So most people in the world will use two of these. I just—there’s a little gap in there between the outer layer and then the inside part that protects the reed, and I just get them in there like that, start like that, get them in the little gap. The reed goes in the middle. And then once they’re in as far as they’ll go, just push them in and just kind of squish them in there. That’s fine. And there you go. So now you can see the center part is where the reed goes, and then in between there’s a little gap, and that’s where the packets go. Cool.

(1:40:40) All right, so then we put our digital hygrometer cap back on. This also measures and displays the temperature, although there’s not much you can do about that. So now seeing 56% humidity, which is what it was in this room just a couple minutes ago. And this humidity level will start to go up as we are speaking here.

(1:41:08) I love the Infinity chanter. It has an amazing sound. It has a bright sound. It comes in Blackwood and plastic. This is the plastic one. It’s got the Infinity logo here, it looks like a sideways number eight. And what I love about this chanter is it’s got this amazing sound, but the smaller holes. So it’s never going to be—a pipe chanter hole is never going to be as small as a practice chanter, just because this is a conical bore, and the bore gets wider as it goes down. So it means the holes need to get bigger as it goes down. So you’re never going to have a pipe chanter with these tiny little holes, but this chanter gives you a big, bright, bold projecting sound that’s crisp and clear, that’s well balanced up and down, with these holes that are smaller and spaced closer together.

(1:42:02) In addition to my Tone Protector Humidity Controlling Chanter Cap, I got my Tone Protector Reed Case. Same technology. You got the humidity controlling packets on the back. Holds up to 15 reeds. I’ve already picked out these reeds. These are my Foundation reeds. Foundation reeds are also an exclusive reed that you can only get from the BagpipeLessons.com shop. These are made for me by Adrian Melvin. And Adrian and I have been collaborating on this reed. He reached out to me initially because he said, “Hey, would you play my reeds? I’m trying to grow my reed business. I would love it if you would play my reeds and promote my reeds.” And I said, “Sure, but they have to be great.” So my personal thing with my shop is that I don’t sell that many things, but everything I sell and promote and talk about and recommend are things that I personally use and have tested and recommend for use.

(1:43:32) So I said, “Okay, let’s do it.” So we went back and forth over the course of, I’d say, probably close to a year perfecting this design. So it’s different than his standard reeds. It’s made specifically for me, for what I’m looking for, which is efficiency, brightness, and ultimate stability. It’s so important that a reed is comfortable to play and efficient, so you’re getting a lot of sound for the effort, but it has to be really, really stable. I don’t want a reed that is really sensitive to blowing pressure. And what he has been able to come up with, what we’ve been able to come up with together, is the best pipe chanter reed I’ve ever played. And they cost more. They’re not for everybody. If you’re looking for a cheap reed or a good deal, this is not the reed for you. But if you’re looking for a reed that is ready to go right out of the box, that has a great sound, that is efficient and clear, and if you want to buy one reed because you only need one reed, then you want the Foundation reed. So these reeds are all 100% picked by me to the exact strength that you want, and it’s a 100% money-back guarantee, and I’ve never had one of these reeds returned. Adrian makes these reeds exactly how I want them. They come shipped to me in Tone Protector Reed Cases. I send him a bunch of empty cases, he fills them up with reeds, he sends them back to me. And the latest order I got from him over Black Friday, they’re all gone already. And they’re very popular. So check them out. Just, you know, they’re called the Foundation reed because a great reed is the foundation to a great sound.

(1:44:46) Since I’ve invented the Tone Protector, I have not licked a reed once. You do not need to lick any reeds because you don’t need to put moisture into these reeds. These reeds have the perfect amount of moisture in the can, and that is achieved by storing them in an environment that has the perfect humidity.

(1:45:08) Okay, let’s try. [Music – testing the chanter] Pretty amazing to me. Right there. Boom. Right out of the box. I think it’s maybe a little bit too deep into the chanter, so I’m going to put a tiny little bit of hemp on there. And I don’t have—so there we go, a little bit of black waxed hemp on the bottom of this reed. Let’s just do a couple wraps: one, two, three. Okay, and because it’s threaded, you just screw it in. High A, push it in. That is great. Love that. No tape.

(1:46:24) So if I was really setting this up for myself, I would put a little bit of tape on every hole and really get dialed in there.

(1:47:14) Okay, comment from JF: “I was thinking about getting an Infinity for solo competition.” Yes, do it. You will love it. You’re going to love this chanter.

(1:48:29) Let’s see how these drones go with the chanter. Probably got to open them up a bit. [Music – testing pipes] That’s amazing! Middle tenor shut off. Need to open it up a little bit more. But this is remarkable. Brand new set of pipes. You’ve watched me put them from pieces into assembled. Brand new set of drone reeds, never been played. Brand new pipe chanter reed, brand new chanter. Stick it all together, and the fact that they’re basically working and totally efficient and totally stable. And basically, you know, I just tuned up the drones. Boom, you’re ready to go. There’s a little bit of fine-tuning that needs to happen with the chanter, as is the case with any new chanter reed and any chanter. You gotta, you know, do some warming up and tuning. But this is amazing how close this is.

(1:49:26) Middle tenor just needs to be opened up a little bit more. There we go. [Music – testing pipes again]

(1:50:29) That’s amazing. Great. Hi Daniel. Yes, it is.

(1:51:32) [Music – playing and tuning]

(1:52:14) That’s amazing. Middle tenor shut off again, open up more.

(1:53:23) [Music – playing again]

(1:54:20) Great. I’m very happy with these pipes. They’re efficient, very stable. If I was going to continue to get things set up, I would just play them some more, add some tape onto the chanter, fine-tune the chanter. Every chanter reed is going to change as it warms up. This pipe chanter stock is a little bit loose, so I’m just going to add a little bit of floss on here, tighten it up.

(1:55:02) So back to the question earlier about how do you make a chanter reed easier. Well, the most important thing to getting an efficient, great-sounding chanter is to have a great reed. And in my experience, great reeds become great when they’re made. So there’s some little adjustments that you can do to a reed to adjust the strength, that sort of thing, but you’re never going to take a terrible reed and make it great. That is what the reed maker’s job is—to make a great reed that then you can play that you can make some fine adjustments to.

(1:55:51) If you do have a reed that is otherwise a good reed but a little bit too hard, don’t pinch it. What you want to do is put an elastic band on it. This is my Precision Tuning Tool Kit, and this is everything that you need to get your chanter reed working. It’s got a sanding pad, it’s got my Piper Ultimate Reed Poker. Now the poker is for when the reed is too easy and you want to open it up. It’s got some tuning tape, and it’s got these rubber elastic bridles. So this is what you want to do if your pipe chanter reed is too hard, is get one of these little elastic bridles.

(1:56:16) I’ll show you up close how that would work. So let me grab a different reed here. So there’s your reed. Now the way that the reed works is that these are two pieces of cane, and there’s a little opening in there. So just like with the drone reed, it functions by—when you push air through it, the air on the inside is moving faster than the air on the outside. It’s rushing through the middle of the reed. And when air is rushing through, it lowers the pressure, which then sucks these two blades together and pushes them together. But then the springiness opens them back up. So that happening—they’re getting sucked together because of the lower air pressure and then popping back apart due to the springiness of the cane—is what creates the sound.

(1:57:02) So really what you want to do if you want to make that reed easier is you want to push these two pieces of cane a little bit closer together so that they take lower pressure to close down. So you take one of these little elastic bridles. Here’s what I do: I put it around my fingers like that, and I put it around the reed like this. Now don’t let go, because I’m going to double it. And I’m going to double it again. Now there it is. I’ve taken that reed, and it’s going to be way easier to blow now. And the great thing about this is that unlike scraping or sanding or cutting or carving, this is reversible. If I decide, “Oh my gosh, it’s too easy now,” now I just scoot it down. In fact, you can scoot it down all the way onto the wrapping, and there it’s just there and it’s ready for you in case you need it.

(1:58:07) So that’s it—the elastic band. I first heard about this from Richard Parkes and Field Marshal Montgomery, that this is one of the things that they were doing to ease up hard reeds and to bring up the pitch. So once again, my Precision Tuning Tool Kit: you get the sanding pad, you get the tape, you get the poker, and you get the rubber band reed bridles. And it all comes with a little handy-dandy little BagpipeLessons.com pouch to store all that stuff in.

(1:58:42) So there we are. We got—we’re getting close here. What else do we have to do? Well, I’m going to take my Infinity chanter now. The Tone Protector is already up to 70%, but that’s going to come up to 84%. And I’m going to close that on there, and it’s got the storage tube. That’s going to be good to go. We got our Tone Protector Reed Case, the perfect humidity level, with three extra Foundation reeds in there. Backup replacement packets. So if you have a Tone Protector Chanter Cap, you want it to be 84%, plus or minus a little bit. If it’s 86, no problem. If it’s 82 or even 81, 80, fine. But if it’s consistently below 80, I would look into replacing those packets. And when you take them out, you will see that they are all hard and crunchy because all the water has been released from them. So I don’t recommend that you try to add water to your Tone Protector. It’ll work to bring the humidity up, but it also increases your chances of mold. So I wouldn’t recommend that. It’s just worth getting these packets. A pack of 10 is going to last you maybe even years, as long as you keep them sealed up tight.

(1:59:50) All right, we got some black hemp. Let’s see what else. This person also ordered the Walsh practice chanter reed and my new Endurance Practice Chanter, which is the world’s first practice chanter with a moisture control system built in. So the way that it works is that just like the Dri-Flos had that orange silica gel desiccant, the Endurance Practice Chanter works on the same principle. The top of the chanter—well, I’ve got one right here. The chanter top looks like a regular practice chanter top. This is actually two parts, and inside here—you can hear that—inside here is a canister with desiccant. So on a normal practice chanter top, this is just a tube that you blow through that covers the reed. But in this case, this part unscrews, and inside you have these canisters, which—there’s three of these Endurance cartridges, I call them. And when they’re in there, the air can’t get to your practice chanter reed without passing through them.

(2:00:38) So here it is. Currently, I’ve been playing this set of canisters for over a week—no moisture on the reed at all. So that is a great option. And our first batch of those sold out within hours, and we’ve got more, so you can check that out too.

(2:01:18) So we’ve got—let’s go through our list here. Our R. G. Hardie Precision-Made Poly Bagpipes, check. With the Bannatyne hybrid small bag. Ezeedrone combo reeds, Dri-Flo moisture control system, Perfect Angle Blowpipe Positioner, we’ve got our Tone Protector Reed Case with Foundation reeds, we’ve got our Tone Protector Chanter Cap in pink, we’ve got our Walsh backup practice chanter reed to go with our Endurance Practice Chanter, we’ve got an extra set of the Endurance Cartridges, we’ve got some black waxed hemp, we’ve got our silk black cords, our regular Ezeedrone set is our spare set, we’ve got our small Bannatyne hybrid bag with a zipper on the bottom.

(2:02:02) And then finally, we’ve got the Bagpipe Gauge. So this is something that you are going to want if you want to have a great sound. You need to be able to blow steady, and there’s no tool that is better for helping you learn to blow steady than the Bagpipe Gauge. So this is a specialty low air pressure gauge that you hook up to your pipes. This attaches to your blowpipe. You can play, and you can look at it, and it’s going to show you the air pressure inside your pipes. There’s a little tiny tube that plugs into one end of your drones, and this is amazing. I mean, when pipers try this for the first time, they love it because it is so fun to be able to see what’s happening with the air pressure. Without this, it’s like you’re flying blind, right. You’re a submarine with no sonar and no periscope, you’re a car with no mirrors and no gauges.

(2:03:01) So what this allows you to do is have two things which are really important. One, you can see the exact pressure of your pipes. So when somebody says to me, “I think there’s something wrong with my pipes, but I’m not sure if it’s my pipes or if it’s me,” which is a great question, I’ll say, “Well, what does it say on the gauge?” And if the gauge says 30, well, that’s pretty good. If the gauge says 36, that’s way too hard, right. So knowing the exact strength of your pipes is very important, and the gauge will give you that fact.

(2:04:06) I have one right here that’s all assembled. Let me show you. Comes in your little BagpipeLessons.com pouch, and yeah, so this is what it looks like. All right, so this plugs into the top of one of your drones, little stopper, a tiny little air tube. So not only does it register—and there’s a little deluxe mount that you can attach to your blowpipe so you can see it while you’re playing—not only does it tell you the exact strength of your pipes, but it shows you the steadiness. So if it’s moving around, you’re not steady. If it’s locked in, you’re steady. And when you hear these great pipers with this great sound—chanter perfectly tuned, that wall of tone coming from the drones—you can be sure that they are blowing extremely steady. There’s no way to get your pipes precisely in tune if they’re moving around. So I recommend that. That’s the Bagpipe Gauge.

(2:05:02) So I think we got everything here. Daniel, these pipes are awesome. The only additional thing that a person would need to be totally set up here would be a bagpipe case. So I don’t have them on my shop, but I do have a couple of the R. G. Hardie deluxe cases here, and I think maybe you might want one of those. So let’s be in touch, Daniel, if you’re still watching.

(2:05:53) Last question here. Mike Kenny says, “I have an Ezeedrone tenor reed that moving the bridle a hair goes from shutting off to too strong.” So it could be that that reed needs to be replaced. That is one of the things that happens with a really old drone reed, or just when the reed starts to die, is that it will start to shut off. What ends up happening is that the vibrating tongue starts to lose its springiness, so it starts to shut off, it’s too weak. And then you open it up, and then it’s taking too much air. So that was a symptom of the really, really early generation synthetic reeds. They were like that, which is they didn’t really have much of a sweet spot. It was like shutting off or hogging air. And that still is—I mean, that problem has basically been solved by slight improvements in the design, and I think the material of the tongue is really, really important. So I would look at maybe getting a new set of Ezeedrones. They don’t last forever. It’s not the age, it’s the mileage. You know, they don’t age just by sitting around. A brand new set of reeds that’s not being played will just continue to be in that condition. But if you’re playing them a lot, or as you play, they just start to wear out. The other thing that happens is that there’s like kind of residue and dirt and stuff that builds up under the tongue just from breath and being out in the world. And it’s very hard to clean that out, and that kind of residue and that stuff that gets under the tongue also contributes to the reed shutting off over time.

(2:06:57) Well, gosh people, this has been really great. Two hours six minutes, never done this before. Thanks everybody for tuning in, and have a great Friday, have a great weekend. And if you’re watching this on the replay, feel free to post comments. I’m always checking the channel and seeing what’s going on, and we will be in touch. Thanks everybody. Check out BagpipeLessons.com, and if you like this video, join the channel. Cheers everybody, have a good one. See you next time. Mahalo.