Pastoral Pipes - Bagpipes for all!

The pastoral pipes are a very rare breed of British bagpipe. They were the ancestors of the lovely irish uilleann pipes, the sound of which is utterly distinct from the Highland pipes, and has been described as a "honeyed hive of sound"

Many people get completely hung up by the word "bagpipe" and all its associations; sporrans, glens, shortbread and so forth. Well, they really need to get over it because they're missing out on something fantastic.

So, the pastoral pipes came along in the early 18th century when they were promoted as something that every gentleman ought to count amongst his accomplishments. At this time there was nothing particularly gaelic about them, but by the end of that century they seem to have transmogrified into the Union Pipe, which may or may not have had something to do with the Act of Union. And then, in the 20th Century, they were again adapted and became the Uillean pipe of today.

One of the challenges of bagpipes is that you have no embouchure - so no tonguing notes, and no help to leap around between octaves. The Uilleann pipes are played on the knee, so the end of the pipe is closed, and you raise the fingers for a note, so stacatto is possible, and you can raise the pressure to jump octaves. This help isnt available in the pastoral pipe, but somehow they did it, as the surviving music attests. It would all have been in the reed.

Unfortunately, no reeds survive. Now the reed not only generates the sound, but it constitutes part of the bore of the instrument. So the reconstruction of the instrument from surviving chanters is handicapped from the start.

This chap Anderson http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/music/index.html speaks authoritatively about pastoral pipes. Chris Bayley has made them in the past, and he was very helpful to me in the bag design and construction. There's also a substantial article in Wikipedia.

The pipes are a project of Dave Armitage, my tutor at the London Metropolitan University woodwind department. He has a vision that they could become popular again, perhaps played in sessions, if they could fit in better with other instruements, and over come the problems of the octave leap.

My pipes are making good progress. They all told me to buy a bag, but I had to make one. It really hurt! You have to pull the threads through 4 layers of leather and after a bit your hands fall to pieces.

The drone stock it not yet fitted to the bag - it means one less complication, and a source of leaks while I learn what to do with the chanter.

And then there's the reed making - worth a blog in their own right.

Watch this space! Pastoral pipes are sound of the future!

Build a canoe in a weekend

You can't; it's impossible.

This was the challenge that Brandon and I set ourselves. After taking a hefty plastic canoe upstream to the Arctic circle in Finland, we felt we were overdue a decent canoe.

We had every advantage - experience in boat building, a workshop big enough to swing an eight, a bandsaw, planer, skilsaw, trestles, heating, the works.

Brandon cut out the ply to shape before we started, so we'd already broken the rules, and he faired some of the drafting errors. Works started on Friday evening, and by 1am most of the planks were sewn together with copper ties.

We paddled home to Andy's canal boat and fell asleep instantly.

In the morning we carried on stitching. Jojo came to help, and fed us when we looked hungry.

Thanks Jo-jo, you saved our sanity!

The gunwales and the inwales we cut from a lump of joinery pine, on a truculent bandsaw. As the pine was 8' long the pieces had to be scarfed together.

Its a good one, isnt it?

The strips, only 33mm by 15mm wouldnt go around the sheer so we rigged up a stove, coffee tin, foil and hoover pipe to make a steam box. Even so it was a three man job to clamp them in position.

We ended up with 25 clamps on one side of a boat, and three more sides to go!

So we had to make a million nips, to do the job of clamps.
In the meantime our host, Andy, harkening to the beat of a different drummer, was hacking up yet more joinery pine to make a strip planked boat. The stem was laminated from some well seasoned ash, and a strong back set up on trestles nailed to the floor.

After hours of hideous noises from the bandsaw, planer and router table, most of the joinery pine had been made into sawdust, leaving only a pile of very thin thin thin strips. These began to take shape around the carefully set up moulds, with assistance from Jack.

On Sunday we had a visitation from Jay, who set to work on the strip planked boat. Brandon and I worked on filleting the insides of our canoes. The shed resounded to Show of Hands, ABBA, Kinks and Paul Brady.

By the end of Sunday both ply boats were faired and ready for glassing.

On Monday the glass went on.

I was summoned home at 4:30 pm on Monday. So there you have it - three semi finished canoes. We worked from early morning to the wee small hours for two days, and two goodish days on top, and we didnt finish.

I haven't been so tired or dirty or happy for ages!

The Barge Boat

The Thames Barges are magnificent craft that once plied the East coast Rivers of England and occasionally ventured further afield. They are up to about 100' long, and each one has a barge boat, usually a 14' clinker built rowing/sailing dinghy.

Once there was a barge called Memory and when her trading days were ended she was restored by a Christian sail training organisation called Fellowship Afloat. They intended to use her as their headquarters for sailing small boats around the creeks off Tollesbury.

Tragically, Memory burnt down to the water, and Fellowship Afloat bought a marvellous ex lightship, now called Trinity, and they do much good work from her.

Memory's barge boat was given to another Christian sail training charity called Morning Star of Revelation, who do similar work on the Medway, but they run a 56' gaff ketch of that name. They used the barge boat for many years to run between the mooring and number 7 covered slip at Chatham dockyard where they were based. Eventually the barge boat came to grief as it was caught under Thunderbolt pier and crushed as the tide rose under the canting brow.

I obtained a replacement boat for Morning Star, a horrid aluminium dory, and claimed the demolished barge boat, which I intended to restore. I spent lot of time chasing rot about that boat, learning a great deal about boat building, before I gave in.

About this time, my new friend Brandon was about to go to boat building college in Lowestoft. We took the lines off the old barge boat; a weekend's back breaking work. Then we scoured timber yards and had several trees sawn up. I bought the timber, larch and oak, and copper fastenings, and Brandon made the new barge boat.

The picture above was taken recently by Julian Foad of the barge boat in Cornwall. We sail it (downwind only) under a canvas sail from a Montague Whaler, which has a foot length of 12'6", so tacked down to the stem head it sheets in to the transom!

The launch day was almost a disaster. As we towed it to Maldon, I stopped for traffic and the car behind ploughed straight into it. I thought she would be smashed, but she had punched the forward support over, and the strongback of the trailer took the brunt of the force, which was transmitted safely into the chassis of my car. The car that hit us was mangled, and the poor driver was in tears, as he had only just passd his test, and it was a new car.

We launched her a week afterwards at Bradwell Marina, and christened her Helena Jo, after my eldest daughter. We have had some great trips - the length of the navigable Crouch, right up the Butley River, and around Brightlingsea for the relaunch of Pioneer, a first class Essex smack rebuilt by Brandon with some help from Brian Kennel and chums .

Now Helena Jo has gone to Topsham to look after my brother, until we do a swap and he has Moondance back. She will take part in the Exe Estuary Challenge, a mad small boat raid around ten of the pubs on the tidal Exe.

An Ivory Tenor Recorder

In the Edinburgh University Collection of Historical Musical Instruments is a tenor recorder made from Ivory. It has been measured and copied, and very good drawings are available. I bought copies of the drawings and made the tools required to produce an instrument.

My copy is made from Maple.

This is my copy. It was my first foray into key making, and I had a lot of fun cutting out the brass and filing and polishing it, and making the mechanism work. I had trouble with the key fouling the fontanelle when in the raised position, so the note played flat because it was shaded by the key.

The key makes reaching the lowest note a pleasure - many tenors present quite a stretch in doing so.

The fontanelle is a very thin cylinder of wood perforated by many tiny holes. Its chief function is to protect and hide the key mechanism but by the time I had finished it I felt like making another cover to protect the fontanelle!

I made a stupid mistake when the instrument was nearing completion - The foot is reamed to a bit of a flare, with the same tool that is used to make the bore. I over reamed this flare, ruining it for good. the lowest note now plays c sharp instead of c. Quite useful for playing in d of course, as there is no way of making a c sharp otherwise. Some day I will make another instrument and get it right!

The original ivory has shrunk to an oval section, making it impossible to guess what the original bore was. The bore profile shows a distinct constriction or choke, typical of instruments of this period.

http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi is the website for the museum that houses the original.

Mr Arnold Myers, the curator of this museum said very kind words about my copy when he saw it, and invited me to Edinburgh to view the original and play the several copies that were made for that purpose.

I think the copying was undertaken by Peter Spohr and presented in the international Symposium of Musical Acoustics, but I havent yet tracked down the paper.

My instrument plays the octave and a half that would be expected of a renaissance tenor, with a very acceptable tone.

Moondance, a gaff cutter

Moondance is our boat. She was built by a chap called Martin Brown and he did a very good job. She is 32 feet long, and you couldnt get a chunkier 32 foot boat.

Martin sailed her across the Atlantic. In those days she was yellow. When we bought her she was white. Here she is parked in the Helford River, one of the most beautiful places in the world. Later last year we brought her back to Essex, and right now she is being re-painted in Fambridge. Her last sail was at New Year, when we had a Very Blustery Time.

Here we are - me, Catherine, Alice, Shona, Andrew (left to right) on a lovely sunny day - 1st January, 2007

Several Instruments

The instruments that I make are all wood. Occasionally I copy instruments with keys, but its tedious work, and they spoil the lines. Plain wood is best. Of course it has its limtations musically, but for reasons that I may explain later, I have a deep mistrust of all things that tend to overcomplication in life, and in music.

This whistle of mine is made from cherry wood, photographed within yards of my home on a cherry tree.

When a woodwind instrument warms up, its pitch sharpens. Not a problem if you are on your own, but difficult when you're playing with other people, as it must be pre-warmed to bring it to its correct pitch. Some makers add a tuning slide, but this is something I havent attempted yet. Unless the inner metal sleeve is very thin indeed, it will introduce perturbations into the bore with dire tuning complications.

A slight dissappointment to me has been that I cant make a whistle as loud as a plastic susato whistle. This is mostly due to the material. Wood is porous, and will remain so no matter how much oil you put in it. The porosity absorbs some of the sound energy. Box wood is amazingly tight grained and very impermeable. You can test the permeability of woods by trying to blow down the end grain, sealing your lips onto the wood.Try it with oak - you can almost breathe through it. Try it with box; nothing. Box wood is the ultimate wood for flutes. However, it is very difficult to obtain in decent sizes. Cherry on the other hand, you can buy in huge lumps from a hardwood dealer, or blag it from tree surgeons.

This is a rennaisance recorder that I made last year. I like the simplicity of the shape. I like the fact that I found the wood lying about on a dump, and I made a pair that play together beautifully.

The block in this recorder is made from Cedar of Lebanon.Strictly speaking its not the best wood - pencil cedar is the more stable for this critical role. However, it smells wonderful when you work it.

Here are some more instruments. The background is not representative of the species that they were made from. On the left is another rennaisance recorder, an early model with poorly undercut toneholes, but nice american cherry that coloured nicely with oiling. The other two are fifes/flutes in maple, which is another suitably dense but easily obtainable wood.