I began making bagpipes in 1995 and was taught by Charley Kron. For the first six months I spent entire 8-hour days roughing down billets of African Blackwood with a hand gouge on an old lathe that once stood in David Glen’s shop in the 1800s. I bored the pieces on the same lathe.

Roughing, for those unfamiliar with the term, means turning the corners off a squared billet so it can be fitted to another lathe for a separate process.

I didn't know it at the time but I was basically roughing and boring wood the same way it had been done for hundreds of years by bagpipe makers. One piece at a time, by hand, all day long. To say that in that first six months I became intimately acquainted with African Blackwood is an understatement. I breathed blackwood dust all day long.

This was a great learning experience because I got to know the characteristics of each piece of wood I held, turned, and bored on a level that very few makers today do. I could spot a bad piece from across the shop. I could hold it in may hand, observe the grain, figure, and color, even the smell, and predict how well it would bore, turn and respond to the tools. At this point in my pipemaking career, after thirteen years of hand-turning, I've got more experience roughing down blackwood than I care to remember.

When I select wood for a set of pipes, I pick all thirteen pieces (8 for the drones, 5 for the stocks) at once. I match up the wood for color, grain, age and bore consistency.
Then I start making the pipes and at this point it’s pretty clear to me if the wood is ready to make into an instrument. Well seasoned wood has a certain feel under your tools. It has a certain sound when the tools are working it. It even has a different smell from blackwood that isn't well- seasoned.

A craftsman knows these things, but machines do not. If a maker hasn't spent a lot of time behind a lathe working wood by hand he is missing out on the most important aspect of the instrument: the quality of the wood.

On a personal level I also feel that great instruments are made by makers who have a hands-on approach to their craft and have an emotional connection to their passion – like the great pipes by the great makers of 100 years ago.

I see a problem in pipemaking today in that there has been a dramatic shift away from the traditions that produced the finest instruments ever played. Some pipemakers are turning out large numbers of pipes every week in what has become an automated process.

The problem is not with change; the problem is with the wood.

Companies producing literally dozens sets of pipes per week are of necessity doing so with wood that is not seasoned. This wood is wet. So, instead of pipes being made after the wood is seasoned, that wood begins seasoning after the pipes are made.

The result, oddly enough, is not cracking. (Well seasoned wood cracks more easily than wet wood.) The problem is wood shrinkage, particularly when pipes reach the drier North American climate. The mounts come loose and begin to fall off (sometimes within days). The bores shrink and the drones may become harder to reed and lose their initial steadiness. Within months, the original specifications of the pipe have changed. You don’t really have the same bagpipe you bought.

I don’t think there’s ever been a time when respect for the basic material of pipemaking has been lower, when so much wood has been used so soon after it has been cut, rather than years after it has been cut.

One of my personal goals as a craftsman, businessman and musician is, in my own small way, to help revive the meticulous craftsmanship and respect for materials that was once the founding principle of the great pipemakers.