How did you find your first set of pipes?

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How did you find your first set of pipes?

Post by Bagpipe Central »

How did everyone find their first set of pipes?

From an instructor?
From a shop nearby?
Online?
In a neighbour’s basement?

We have heard many different stories about finding that first set and thought it would be interesting to start a thread...

Cheers!
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rorybbellows
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Re: How did you find your first set of pipes?

Post by rorybbellows »

I got loan of a practice set from my instructor, then after a while I ordered a practice set from Dave Williams and built on it from there. A familiar story with a lot of pipers I'm sure.
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Re: How did you find your first set of pipes?

Post by Steve Bliven »

I left my car unlocked one night...

Best wishes.

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Re: How did you find your first set of pipes?

Post by Nanohedron »

Steve Bliven wrote: Sun May 16, 2021 1:20 pm I left my car unlocked one night...
Good one. :lol:

I heard it through the grapevine. A local pipes/flute/whistle maker wound up with a full Ginsberg medium-bore C set in his lap - so to speak - and he wanted to unload it, and a mutual friend who knew about it picked me. The UPs had never really entered my mind before, but I just had to bite.
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Re: How did you find your first set of pipes?

Post by Mogens Hundevad »

Hi! In 1977 i was on som job-training in Waterford. One night i saw The Furey's in a pub and met Brian Howard there. A fer Days later i ordrede a practice set to be ready when i returned a month later for more training. I picked up the set, and Brian had arranged som clases with Tomme Kearney and i returned to Denmark with the 1. tune in the bag. 1 year later i had the upgrade to a full set wich i have played since then. I also bought a newer generation of Brians chanter fully kyed 35 years later
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Re: How did you find your first set of pipes?

Post by an seanduine »

I must paraphrase from The Jew of Malta:
¨Thou hast committed --¨
/Fornication {Or some other Grave Sin}:But that was in another country {And a lot of years ago}
/Besides the wench is dead¨

:D Bob
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The Beginner's mind has endless possibilities.
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Re: How did you find your first set of pipes?

Post by daveboling »

Back in the days before the internet, a local piper (who knew I was looking for a starter set) called me and said there was a Brian Howard practice set for sale in South Carolina (about a 6-7 hour drive). He gave me the seller's telephone number. When I called the seller, he said he wasn't home, but he had the set with him. He and his wife had gone to take care of his mother-in-law. When I asked where he was, he replied "Huntsville, Alabama", which by great chance is where I was. When I asked him where in town he was staying, he asked his wife where they were, and the address she gave was a 10 minute walk from my location. He brought the set over, and we both sat there looking at it. He had never learned to play it, and while I can play quite a few woodwinds, bagpipes of any flavor weren't in the mix. So, I bought the set, and between the local piper, NPU VHS/cassette tapes, and once a year tionols I began on the path.

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Re: How did you find your first set of pipes?

Post by pancelticpiper »

Great story Dave!

Mine is far more mundane: in the 1970s the local (California) shop Lark In The Morning was selling Practice Sets, which I bought.

I can't think of the maker now but in retrospect they were pretty bad. Pretty sure they were made in the UK. (This was before they started making uilleann pipes in Pakistan, at least beginners were spared that horror then.)

We had an eccentric local pipemaker back then named Richard Maheu, he mostly made Balkan, Hungarian etc bagpipes but he also made uilleann pipes and reproduction Ancient Irish Warpipes (nothing like Scottish pipes). I saw a set of those in a museum!! The museum people had no idea they were made in California in the 1970s.

Anyhow I had Maheu make me a set of drones for my practice set, which did me until I got a David Quinn chanter around 1980. I added Eugene Lambe drones and regs to the Quinn chanter in the mid-1980s.
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Re: How did you find your first set of pipes?

Post by RLines »

I started learning pipes in 1995 back home in Toronto. Pre-internet and also a time when there wasn't much pipemaking going on in North America. I had a friend who had spent a summer in Dingle a couple of years earlier, and while there became friendly with Cillian O Briain through playing in sessions. Before my friend came home to Toronto at the end of the summer, he managed to convince Cillian to put a practice set together for him, I suspect from parts he had lying around the workshop. So he came home with an early Cillian chanter, as well as a bag and bellows. Sadly he struggled with reed issues in the Canadian climate so never took to the pipes. When I expressed interest in learning he kindly loaned me the set. My teacher Debbie Quigley helped me get a reed going in the chanter, and I learned on that for the first year or so while I was waiting for my first half set to be made by Kirk Lynch. I ended up buying the Cillian set off him in the end as well.

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