Glengarry

[OC Richard]

Your double pipes are awesome, did you come up with the idea or are they a more traditional instrument?
I notice the fingering is the same as the GHB, but spread across two chanters, does it not matter that the left chanter bottom hand is open?
And did you make the set up yourself?

Gavin

Thanks.

I came up with the idea of cobbling together two practice chanters after experimenting with mouth-blowing them. I had a guy who makes Renaissance pipes (including doublepipes) make the special stock and bag.

But the idea has been around for a very long time. Doublepipes were quite common in Europe and Britain in the Renaissance period.

I bought a set of Julian Goodacre's Cornish Doublepipes. Here is Julian playing one of his sets

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl4uQYGfZ5o

I really liked the things, but I wanted something that would use ordinary Scottish fingering, and also something that was more stable (the Goodacre Cornish pipe was very difficult to blow into tune).

Julian's approach to the fingering layout is brilliant, assigning one chanter for each hand, and being laid out in such a way that using fully closed fingering (like the NSP) or partially closed (like the GHB) one chanter or the other is always playing the bellnote, which creates what Julian calls a "virtual drone". Then, at will, you can play polyphony.

So I'm just using ordinary practice chanters and ordinary Highland fingering. Doing nothing whatsoever different you get a steady unbroken Low A drone. But you can play harmony when you want.

Try it, if you have two practice chanters. You need to tape over certain holes. The hole layout is this: (o=open hole x=taped over hole)

o ooo xxxo (the chanter for the upper hand, which, due to GHB fingering, plays Low A whenever you're playing any low-hand note on the other chanter)
x xxx oooo (the chanter for the lower hand, which, due to GHB fingering, plays Low A whenever you're playing any upper-hand note on the other chanter)

Jerry Gibson got enthusiastic about my doublepipes and has started to make them. I don't know how well his work. The trick is getting two exactly matched reeds. They have to be far more matched than any two chanter reeds in the history of Highland piping, and have to be precisely identical in pitch, volume, strength, and timbre. If not you lose the effect.