Here’s a thought.
How many young people are taking up the art of pipe-making.
I read in an article somewhere that Alain Froment reckons that he has enough work now to see him to the end of his career. This just got me thinking.
In, say, 15-20 years there will be a big number of pipe-makers heading towards retirement. Froment, Wooff, Thompson and maybe more in the 45/55 age bracket.
The thing is, whos going to take over.
How many makers are there under the age of 35, say. Or how many of the current established or full time makers have apprentices.
Just my thought for the morning.
Tommy
The list of pipemakers doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter, so I’m not sure what raises the concern. Many pipers and pipemakers say there is little or no living to be made from this stuff, so there’s not much of an attraction for a young person to base a career on pipemaking. However, there’s more than enough entertainment in pipemaking for someone who is retired or semi-retired, so that I doubt that the age of the pipemaker has much to do with anything. By the time the polar icecaps melt I’m sure people will have documented this stuff to the hilt so that anyone in future who wants to pick this up can do so.
djm
The concern really is who is following in the shoes of Froment, Wooff, Quinn, the late Dave Williams?
While following in the giant shoes of those mentioned above would be a wonderous thing, I expect that there’ll come along makers who’ll set the bar higher by their own innovations, utilizing the latest that technology has to offer, and the sound advice of the steadily growing numbers of pipers out there, thereby adding to what seems to be an already stable list of known great pipemakers. I am convinced such a person/people exists, they just haven’t stepped into the limelight yet.
Some younger makers with fairly good reputations and shorter waiting lists may find they get more orders, esp as the 50+yr olds are getting booked out for the rest of their careers.
B
Meet or exceed the standard set by the top makers is a tall order. So many seem to get into the pipemaking business but don’t set the world on fire. While pipemakers don’t publish the secrets and insights of their techniques, they do ‘publish’ their work. One would think that since everyone has access to all of that information, we would see one set after another reaching a higher and higher standard.
I’d like to see someone figure out how to make a great set and have the operation scalable to easily meet demand and attractive price points. The sets produced by the top group is relatively small (I’d heard that Dave Williams was producing 4 set a year and balancing his workload with aftermarket maintenance and flutes). Demand seems to be still going up and I hate to see that newbie interest going to waste on inadequate sets.
…I share the same opinion, but I doubt I will see this come to pass in my lifetime…not to say it will never happen.
…
Well, plenty of other musical instrument makers have done this.
For example, one can buy a “Kentucky” F-style mandolin for about $200 or so.
One can also buy a Gibson mandolin, but that might cost $5,000 or more.
But have you ever compared the sound of the two? They should sound the same (same basic materials, right?) – but they don’t, and there’s a reason why Gibson can get market prices of $5,000 for their instruments.
Cost = quality.
Hi,
The two mandolins don’t sound the same because it’s mainly the wood that’s vibrating (started by the strings). The quality of materials and skill of voicing it is paramount.
With a chanter it’s mainly a column of air that’s vibrating (started by the reed).
Basically we are buying a long tapered hole with a few other holes attached.
Once a few standards have been set and approved the bore could be cut with a single compound reamer and finger holes and outside cut with a CNC (computer controlled router).
Drones would be easier.
After a prohibitively excessive initial investment it would result in lots of good cheap pipes.
Then it just has to be reeded!!
If only Yamaha made pipes.
But back to the main topic, I think we could do with a lot more pipe makers but as mentioned earlier they don’t earn a lot. We would certainly have to pay more for them if we wanted to attract the best new talent.
David Lim
…
Agreed, David, but the basic premise I posed is that cost = quality.
There are all sorts of comparisons that can be drawn in this case - but the reason for producing a product cheaper means that a maker is willing to sacrifice a certain amount of quality (which takes time and expertise) so that a product can be made quicker.
Your view of “a column of air that is vibrating” is a good point.
So let’s say that a factory begins churning out chanters by the hundreds or even thosands. Those computer-driven lathes have certain tolerances in them… no different than the tolerances of the Quality Control human being whose job it is to say “Pass” or “Fail”.
Another reason you haven’t noticed a “PipeMakers, Inc.” founded to mass-produce pipes is because it simply isn’t cost effective.
So in exchange for sheer numbers (more product, cheaper price to the buyer) we have now developed a set of industry guidelines and the tolerances to go with them. (would you want to accept delivery of a chanter that was made on the Monday morning following a holiday)?
I don’t necessarily agree that demand has gone up substantially in the past few years. Over the past 15 years, it most certainly has, but I think it’s leveling off recently. With that spike in demand, there surely has been enough to keep good pipemakers busy, but will it last? I don’t think so - there’s too many other diversions for younger people today, and there are far more musical instruments that are both cheaper and easier to learn how to play.
There’s my $0.02.
The world economy has certainly been off for a few years but now with four more years of the Bush Push…
Never mind.
That’s right - if uilleann pipes don’t sell, “it’s Bush’s fault”.
Either that, or it will be because of the evil “big uilleann” monopoly.
:roll:
Brian, I do agree that generally cost=quality.
But I believe the relationship between cost and quality differs between mandolins (or stringed instruments in general) and pipes. And differs in our favour.
Building an excellent mandolin is like building an excellent reed. It is a highly skilled craft in which the practitioner has to match their skill and experience against a material that is considerably inconsistent in order to acheive the desired goal.
Building pipes (not reeds) that sound well and are in tune is engineering.
How they look is a craft, if not an art.
If the basis of a excellent reedable and playable set of pipes is engineering not art or craft then modern manufacturing techiniques could radically lower the cost and ease of access to good pipes.
Following this process the cheap chanter would be far closer in quality (as a musical instrument) to the expensive hand made example than for the same comparison with mandolins.
Computer controlled workworking equipment will become smaller and drop in price over the next 10 years. Perhaps we should look forward to the lathe free pipe workshop.
David Lim
Great ideas here from every one.
I suppose I should have titled the thread, “Could we run out of pipe makers.”
Is there a danger that no-one will want to make the instrument.
There always have been and probably always will be part-time makers who have served the piping community excellently over the past 200 years.
But it is really the full-time makers that had time and rescources to experiment and perfect the instrument.
For example lets take Leo Rowsome, Billy Taylor and James Coyne.
We can almost assume they were exposed to pipes at young ages. They all learned the trade of pipe-making from their dads early and each continued to make pipes till the end of their days.
After Rowsome died in 1970 we were left with part-time makers or older retired makers to keep pipes out there.
The work of makers like Dan Dowd and Matt Kiernan is immeasurable. If it weren’t for them a whole generation of players would be without instruments and a lot of current pipe-makers would have had no mentors.
Those makers made stuff from cheaper materials and didn’t dwell on making stuff look too fancy. They idea behind that was to keep the pipes affordable. In fact Dan and Matt worked in small sheds behind their houses with inherited tools and machinery so costs were low.
Along came the 1980s and we see the emergence of makers like Froment, Rogge, Wooff, the late Dave Williams, Thompson, Messers Kohler and Quinn etc.
A whole bunch of full-time makers all over again!! All producing exceptionaly high quality instruments.
from things said on this thread it could fair to say that pipe makers don’t earn a fortune. This could be a reason why there are not as many apprentices as there was 20 years ago.
A young chap who was interested in studying and learning from Mr. Froment was told to “come back to me when you have a degree in engineering.”
Degree or no degree I’d guess if someone has the skills to make a full set of pipes on their own, they could use those skills elsewhere and make more dosh.
Now I do know that there are some students of pipe-making out there and there very well may be apprentices out there that I don’t know.
I don’t want to be overly negative but I’d say we could less full-time makers in the future or a big hike in the price to make it worth while for the worthy few who have gone to great lenghts to learn this fine, fine art.
Tommy
Seth Gallagher was an apprentice at the von Heune workshop and now has two apprentices. He will have a pretty high output. Selling a set to Paddy Moloney will always be a big assist for the business.
Doesn’t Andreas Rogge have two apprentices, too?
Violin making schools charge tuition for their three year program. There’s a school right here in Skokie.
Didn’t Kevin Rowsome attend an instrument making school in the UK?
Yeah, the degree isn’t preparation to make pipes… it’s assurance you’ll be able to secure a good paying job if/when you decide pipemaking isn’t for you.
The degree would allow one to discuss pipemaking with Alain.
Yup, he went to the London College of Furniture to learn to make woodwind instruments for a couple years I guess.
J. McGuire:“The degree would allow one to discuss pipemaking with Alain.”
…it certainly wouldn’t hurt to utilize it when making pipes either.
…
David, I agree on the mandolin example - they’re “relatively” cheaper and can sound nearly alike (some, not all) because of the economies of scale (which come with computer-guided manufacturing processes).
However, I disagree that we may one day see this happen with uilleann pipes, and it’s due to the lack of demand. Let’s recall that not 40 years ago, the instrument nearly died out. Had that happened, who’d be playing them today? What’s more, who’d be MAKING them today? Far fewer in both regards, is my guess.
But I don’t see the demand suddenly skyrocketing for UPs. Someone on this forum a while back was trying to estimate the number of players world-wide… what was that number? A few thousand?
That’s as many mandolins as Gibson makes in a month, is my bet. (perhaps its many more than that).
You make valid points, however, I just think that there is SO much more that requires a skilled eye - and note, too, that makers today are copying the types of pipes that were made by a wide variety of makers and styles.
Personally, I think that uilleann piping will be taking a poorly-planned step if pipemaking goes the route of mass-produced via machines. Who’d want pipes to all sound alike? Not me!
There’s my $0.02.