Uilleann Bagpipes on Neale Pickett

Bellows Skew

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here are my current bellows panels:

This was a little difficult to work with, because the fabric doesn’t hit it at a right angle. it’s much wider at the bottom than the top. You can see in this photo how the top of the bellows is really more like a hinge, and the bottom is where all the expansion happens. You pretty much place the panels onto the fabric at this angle, and then glue them on. That means at the bottom in particular, there’s a very small contact patch with the panel, unless you really work the material to stretch it around. The top has a similar issue.

All About Bagpipe Hose

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On my David Daye set, I think there’s ¾ inch inside diameter clear hose. I can’t find anything on his site that explains why he picked this size: my guess is it was easier to find plastic tubing to fit into it. But I’m creating bespoke compenents for everything, so I can pick any size I like.

Are there standards for bagpipe tubes? I can’t find any. Garden hose is pretty standard, though: ⅝" inside diameter. And barbed adapters are ubiquitous, so I’ll put one of those on my outlet adapter. I’ll also add some texture to the part you grab, so it will be easier to twist in and out.

Gitpages

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Somebody in Australia emailed me about my bagpipe project, and it lit a fire under me to clean things up a bit.

In a previous entry, I complained that I couldn’t find a “static site generator for git” which did what I wanted. What I wanted was to just render the files checked in to HEAD in the browser, and provide instructions about how to clone the repo for deeper inspection.

Blowpipe & Bag Cover

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bag Cover

This weekend I sewed a bag cover out of an old pair of jeans. Turns out my pant leg is just wide enough to cover the bag, but I had to cut through the butt pocket. Now there’s a butt pocket on the bag, lol. I think it makes it look interesting. And it’s a folk instrument, we aren’t playing at Carnegie Hall here.

At some point I’ll take a photo and post it here. Maybe.

Pipes Progress

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week at the Santa Fe Slow Session I let slip that I play the Irish (Uilleann) bagpipes. Jack, the leader, exhorted me to bring them. So I spent all week getting them playable again.

The way I’m doing this is to replace my current pipes piece by piece with parts I’ve modelled in OpenSCAD and 3d printed. So far, I have made these parts:

Chanter

My current chanter design. 75¢ to print at 10% infill, $1.49 to print at 100% infill.

Pipe Flares

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m making slow progress on my uilleann pipe project. I’ve had a chanter that plays well for about 6 months now: I’m using it instead of the one I bought, because I can hit the hard D on mine, and the back D is easier to get in tune.

It’s not enough to make a good sounding chanter, though: players want something that looks the part. They’re right to be concerned about this. Whether a player will admit it or not, playing the instrument is a spectacle, and unless you’re going for a wildly new feel to your performance, your instrument needs to maintain a certain aesthetic.

Filing my nut / Uilleann practice chanter

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Filing my Nut

Ever since Amy got me this Bouzouki, the B (2nd fret, 3rd course) has been sharp. As I moved up the fretboard to the octave fret, the notes got more in tune, so I knew the position of the bridge was okay. My suspicion was that the strings were too high off the fretboard, which meant the nut needed work.

The nut is a little block of wood, plastic, or bone, between the head (where the tuners are) and the fretboard. It lifts the strings up off the fretboard so that they don’t buzz against the frets. But if it lifts them too high, you can get the exact kind of intonation problem I was having.

Drone reed

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been corresponding with “Animatorgeek” about the 3D printable Bulgarian bagpipes they designed. The exciting part (for me) about their design is the 3D printed single reed. This is exactly what I need for my Uilleann drones.

After a couple hours of work, I’ve got a working clone of their reed in OpenSCAD. It looks like this:

It looks a lot like a clarinet or saxaphone reed, but smaller. I’ve only modeled the Bulgarian chanter reed so far, but now I have an algorithm that I can give different arguments to make a tiny one.

My pipes and flute

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I took some photos of my stuff this morning.

This is everything in its housing. Starting with the red ribbon and moving clockwise, there’s the Uilleann pipes, some flutes/whistles, my wife’s concertina, some electronic bagpipe stuff, the Uilleann pipe bellows, and the Uillean pipe bag with the air hose on top.

Electronic Pipes

Since they can play drones, I guess this instrument counts as “pipes” and not “a pipe”.

Auto-cran

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s this thing an Uilleann bagpipe can do, commonly called “auto-cran”, but also sometimes called “warble” or “gurgle”. When you hit the low D, you get this rapidly pulsing sound that’s difficult to listen to for long. More specifically, I would characterize it as sounding like it’s bumping up against jumping octaves, then running out of oomph to get there, and coming back down, over and over. I guess it’s not dissimilar to FM synthesis with the driving oscillator running at 6-12Hz.

New Uilleann Pipes

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, my Uilleann pipes arrived.

I ordered them a bit over a year ago, in fall or winter 2023, from David Daye. He makes pipes from readily-available materials in the United States: mostly plumbing equipment. I think the only wood on this thing is the bellows.

The set was sent as a kit. He suggested putting the kit together, since the assembly represents a lot of maintenance tasks. I’m a fan of this approach: it’s how the 3D printer came, and indeed it helped me understand how everything went together, and has made it easier to understand what might need adjusting. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any kit assembly instructions, so I’ve had to work everything out from the instructions that were sent. That’s okay! I like a challenge!