Is this cool or what? I have for a long time been interested in the historic revival of bagpipe music, and when checking in to Julian Goodacre’s website about a month ago, I saw that one of his replica sets was available for immediate sale. Normally there’s a two years waiting period. Said and done, I announced my interest and a little while ago I made a trip to Scotland to check them out and maybe make a purchase. After playing a few hours and pondering a bit, I decided to buy. So, now I am a member of the elect club of heretics who tries to perform on an instrument which is not a set of modern great highland bagpipes.

The drones are replicas after a set from ca. 1720, and the chanter is copied from the chanter known to have belonged to Iain Dall MacKay of Gairloch, the famous blind piper. He lived between 1656–1754, and the original chanter is probably from about 1700. Both originals are in the museum of the National Piping Centre, Glasgow.

The drones are made of pear wood, and are extremely light compared to modern blackwood drones. The chanter is made of Lignum vitae and is in contrast very heavy, partly because the wood is incredibly dense and hard (twice as hard as blackwood), and also because the walls of the chanter are about twice as thick as on a modern chanter.

The drones can, with a bit of work, be played using modern drone reeds. The chanter, however, needs a custom reed using a much longer staple than modern reeds. At the moment, these reeds are very much experimental. They are made by Andrew Frater and Barnaby Brown working together, but when the perfect design has been found, we hope that some of the large reed makers will start making them in quantity.