I posted this in the “Other” forum below, but I thought I might as well post it here too.
Tim and Stephanie Benson, who are pretty well known uilleann pipe makers, live about 15 minutes from my parents in Western NY where I was just visiting. I thought I would look them up for the heck of it and it turns out they are wonderful people to hang out with.
I mentioned that it would be cool to attach an uilleann chanter to my Pinchbeck ETR smallpipes and they agreed! I have four drones (alto, tenor, baritone, bass), and each one has a range of about a fourth. C down to G or G down to C. My Pinchbecks give a lot of great harmonic possibilities! They took some measurements and quickly designed an adapter and then printed it out in no time with their 3D printer- awesome!
Here is Tim trying out his uilleann chanter on Scottish smallpipes made by Chris Pinchbeck, through an adapter designed and 3D printed by Stephanie! This is about a minute after we hooked it up.
It’s nice to see some innovation going on aphillips and some good playing too.
My own idea of a true uilleann/smallpipe hybrid is that it should be possible to play it standing up as well as sitting down and include “on the knee” fingering as well. This little critter does the trick:-
The chanter is compressed to bring the hands closer together and the bell is turned towards the body so that a popping valve can rest somewhere near the belly button. It is possible to do something similar with a conventional straight stick but the player’s upper hand tends to end up being stretched too far forward or too high, especially with the longer flat chanters.
Incidently, my preferred name for a hybrid would be Irish or Uilleann Smallpipes as there is nothing particularly Scottish about smallpipes as a genre. In fact they owe their current existence to a bunch of Geordies.
That’s really cool Driftwood. My chanter is now on it’s way! I’ll be curious to see what angles I can manage with the typical uilleann bar that connects the bag to the chanter. Maybe I will be able to finagle a way to stand too?
Also, there are already a couple of “established” ways of playing a full set standing up if you want to try them. Some of the old street pipers used a kind of walking stick, a one-legged knee stool if you like. And they say the legendary Johnny Doran had a special kind of harness to hold the pipes. I don’t know what that looked like although maybe Martin Nolan has something similar. I’ve seen a video of him jigging about on stage with a rock band!
Quoting myself from another subforum…Well… so what you may have missed is that the Pinchbeck ETR sets have very tuneable drones. For instance, when I am playing a tune that would sound great in B minor, I can tune my tenor, baritone, and bass drones to B, F#, B
Or for a G major piece I can tune the to G, D, G
So yes I lose the lowest D that is available on the uilleann pipes, BUT I’ve gained so many more harmonic possibilities because of what Chris builds.
BTW Chris is starting to develop a contrabass drone for his smallpipe sets now!
