Norden Sackpipa Association of the Americas (NSAA)

[MatthewVanitas]

Each late-summer the Piper's Gathering is held in Vermont; a series of workshops, jams, and concerts of all the "alternative bagpipes". Which is to say, everything but the GHB. For the second year I took my bellows-blown Favre sackpipa up to Vermont as my primary instrument for the long weekend. There are workshops for border pipe, SSP, Northumbrian, uilleann, and Irish flute, tinwhistle, and fiddle. For those of us playing extra-uncommon pipes, there's usually some kind of "catch all" class, which this year was a series of workshops on medieval polyphony for bagpipes taught by Wellesley College instructor Tom Zajac.

I had a great time with the classes; I don't normally get the chance to play part-music harmonies with other pipes, so that was quite novel. Most of the other pipes were G-g range, so the sackpipa's D-d in G was useful for spanning some of the lower parts, and the D drone fit in just fine. I did suffer for not having brushed up on sackpipa (and particularly on bellows) enough after months of playing mostly strings, but managed to muddle through.

I had a great time showing the sackpipa to a large number of musicians and music fans. Even among pipers there are plenty of folks who've never heard of the instrument; thus I made it my sideline mission to get the word out, and to let other folks try out the pipes. A number of musicians borrowed my pipes to try out; of course most played sackpipa far better than I, albeit with Irish, Scottish, or Appalachian tunes. All found it at least fun, with the exception of one uilleann piper at a late-night session who muttered something about "man, I hate scalloped finger-holes" and gave up. One of the better-known smallpipe players absolutely loved the sackpipa and is fixing to get a set, so I'll see if I can convince him to drop by here and post.

In a clear application of the dictum "in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king" I ended up helping two other sackpipa owners set up their reeds, so it felt great to be able to apply even my minimal sackpipa knowledge to help others. One player's reeds were fine, but the owner was chasing the low E (on an E/A) rather than using the rubber tuning ring right. Plus the ring's rubber had gotten weak and was stubborn about staying in place. Another piper had a set he'd never really sat down and messed with since getting it, and it was way off functional. With the ClearTune app on my iPhone (set for Just Intonation around A) I managed to nudge the bridle to a proper A (Hamon synth reeds) with a good high E, and then slide the chanter plunger to fix the low E. The drone... I was having real trouble running out of tuning slide until I realised that he'd taped over both tuning holes. I folded the tape back to expose one hole, and in seconds had the drone humming a good E. No huge endeavor, but it was good evidence that each pipe does have its own quirks, and sharing between pipers can iron those out much faster than struggling alone.


All in all there were four sackpipa at the event, out of 50-some active musicians. Actually not a bad percentage, though I was the only one playing it as my primary. I've been chatting with one organiser, who happens to play sackpipa, and working to convince him to maybe try out just one "Intro to Sackpipa" class in some future year. One brainstorm is that maybe we could get some of Seth's plug-and-play sackpipa chanters and invite SSP players in to try out the chanter plugged into their SSP bag/drones/bellows. I suppose for an absolute bare-bones beginner class any pro music instructor who can competently demo 3-4 sackpipa tunes could instruct, though better yet would be to borrow someone like Dick Hensold away from the NSP workshops for an hour or two and have him teach. I'm just betting that if more folks got to try sackpipa, its popularity would increase yet more. It'd also be interesting to see sackpipa chanters catch on as an alternative D or E chanter for SSP players.

Long report, but the gist is I had a great time, got to see several different styles of piping, and got a few more people exposed to sackpipa.