One Piper Piping Music shop owner crafts new instrument

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More than 200 fledgling pipers can thank the Irish folk group The Chieftains for the ease with which they’re learning to play the Uilleann bagpipe.

It was a Chieftains concert near Detroit some 30 years ago that first exposed inventor Ed Damm to the Seussian pipe. When Chieftain piper Paddy Moloney took an armful of tubing and coaxed out a tune with his elbows and wrists, Damm was fascinated.

“I said, ‘Wow, what is that guy playing?’ It looks like a plumbing experiment, but there’s music coming out of it,” Damm recalled.

Today, Damm not only plays the exotic instrument and sells the Uilleann, or Irish, bagpipes in his Bar Harbor music shop, The Song of the Sea, he has also invented and patented a new pipe called a whistle chanter that eases the transition for beginners tackling the ancient instrument.

Bagpipes are among the oldest musical instruments. Musical fossils were discovered thousands of years ago not in Scotland, but the Middle East, according to Damm.

“Pipes probably started somewhere between Turkey and Iraq – just like folks,” he said.

In time, hundreds of bagpipe variations spread throughout Europe and eventually America, but each shares the same basic design. An oboelike wind instrument called a chanter provides the melody, while a sack filled with air that is compressed by the piper’s elbow powers a series of single-tone harmony pipes called drones.

Highland bagpipes, the most common Scottish incarnation, are a simple bagpipe on steroids. Though limited to nine notes, their sound can travel nearly a mile through the dense Highland fog, so the instrument became entwined with war, used to marshal troops in battle.

“We call the Highland pipes the Harley-Davidson of bagpipes,” Damm said. “It puts out 90 decibels – that’s like three vacuum cleaners running at once.”

Its Irish cousin lost that raw power, but gained a refinement that the Highland pipes lack. The complex Uilleann pipe can produce a melody in three octaves with multiple harmonies and a countermelody. Its long, delicate reeds lend a musical flexibility most pipes don’t have.

“There’s more room to move your notes around, it can get a little bit bluesy,” Damm said.

Interest in Uilleann pipe is said to have boomed after English landlords banned the playing of Highland pipes, also called war pipes, in Ireland because they feared that pipers would lead armies of rioting dissenters.

“You were less likely to be dead if you played that pipe – the Uilleann pipes were more politically correct,” Damm said.

Yards of tubing with dozens of switchback curves probably gave the pipe its tongue-twisting name. In modern Gaelic, Uilleann means elbow. And the instrument’s common name – the union pipe – also speaks to its construction.

Oddly enough, a piper doesn’t blow into any of the countless tubes protruding from all sides of a Uilleann pipe. A seated piper tucks the bag under one arm to power the drones, and with the other elbow compresses bellows that send air into the closed chanter.

For varying notes, the piper releases air from different points on the chanter by lifting fingers from holes, or quickly raising the whole contraption off one knee so sound may escape the bottom of the chanter.

Capping the chanter, to eliminate environmental problems and the moisture of human breath from the equation, makes a closed, or cold-wind, bagpipe like the Uilleann pipe much more reliable, Damm said.

“You could go through a tornado with Irish pipes and still play,” he said.

But dependability comes at the expense of simplicity. The Uilleann pipe is a Gaelic one-man band. Just putting the instrument together and filling its compartments with air produces a dissonance like that of an orchestra tuning up.

A budding Uilleann piper must learn to control the chanter, tune the drones, train the elbows to apply pressure precisely to the bellows and the bag, and use wrists to play a countermelody on the keys that line a third set of tubes called regulators.

“The full set is like Piping 501 – it’s graduate piping,” Damm said.

And a full set of pipes with a chanter, drones and regulators has at least seven handmade reeds that must be kept at a consistent temperature and humidity.

“Reeds are the bane of pipers,” Damm said. “Whenever you get a couple pipers together, they start grumbling about reeds.”

The instrument is so elaborate that only a few dozen craftspeople worldwide build it for sale. Buying a full set of Uilleann pipes can require several years and cost $3,000 or more.

“You almost have to be a jewelry maker as well as a pipe builder,” Damm said.

America’s recent love affair with Irish culture, fueled by dancer Michael Flatley and writer Frank McCourt, spawned a demand for traditional Irish music. Like tin whistles, bones and fiddles, the Irish bagpipes have experienced a sort of renaissance throughout America.

“You can kind of blame it on Riverdance, but what really pushed it over the edge was that scene in ‘Titanic,'” Damm said.

But time and again, Damm saw new bagpipe fans drawn to the Uilleann pipe for its peculiar appearance and its robust, uniquely Irish sound; then discouraged by its cost and the formidable task of learning to control the unwieldy pipe.

Sitting at Sound of the Sea with an Irish tin whistle one day, Damm hit on a solution. Over two years, he manipulated a basic whistle design until it possessed the same note fingerings as a Uilleann pipe’s chanter, playing in the same keys, but an octave higher in pitch.

By blowing into the plastic whistle chanter, a piper can easily practice melodies to learn the mechanics of the pipe chanter without the complications of reeds, bag and bellows. Damm has even tweaked a slide whistle to develop an optional drone that may be tuned to different notes.

It took nearly a year to acquire a patent from the U.S. government. “The patent thing has a life of its own,” Damm said with a sigh.

But since last winter, the Bar Harbor piper has sold more than 200 whistle chanters from his store and Web site at $85 each – a fraction of the investment required for a full set of Uilleann pipes. Damm’s innovation has been favorably reviewed in a national bagpipers publication, and he plans to wholesale the chanter to music shops nationwide next year.

“It’s just a way to get folks started on the Uilleann pipes,” Damm said. “You don’t have to belly up to the bar with more than $1,000 just to try it out.”

For more information about Damm’s whistle chanter, visit his Web page at www.songsea.com/uwc.htm.