Closed order books

Uilleann Pipes
41

Closing the order books is not a statement “I’m not making any more pipes after this” - far from it.

Speaking of ego stroking, a long list could become a vanity too, if the list is too long to reasonably anticipate reaching the end. In which case it does not do a service to anyone but the maker. It certainly doesn’t prove anything about commitment IMO.

The desire to satisfy existing commitments fairly, while retaining the option to make a set for a top-notch player “someday”, when the backlog clears, is one good reason to stop taking orders for awhile. Putting a ‘special’ customer in front of the queue, whether a great player, an eager youngster, or just a personal friend, is quite a different thing from putting a special customer at the end of a “closed” list. The former does seem like grounds for complaint, unless the affected people in the queue are consulted.

Now, as long as the maker can actually meet the agreed-on target dates, I see nothing wrong with ‘slipping in’ a chanter or two - but how many makers can really make those deadlines? Once lists get long, the ability to fix a date reasonably usually goes out the window, so last-come-last-served is the implied expectation.

Nobody seems to have picked up on my point about an open order list as a “public offering”. There are plenty of reasons why makers may wish to limit the range of such offers; after all, the output of any pipemaker is finite.

42

It is is safe to say that pipemakers do not want to spend all of their time making pipes. In fact, most all pipmakers only do it for a month or so out of the year, as the vast majority of their time is spent sunning themselves in St. Tropez, or lounging in a sky suite, sipping brandy while watching the ponies, or just tooling around Rodeo Drive in their Porsche. They have a fondness for better sushi, and can be seen jetting off to Tokyo on a regular basis, and most of them dislike snow and ice, so they tend to their books in the Cayman Islands in the colder months and only venture into the Hamptons for yachting during the high season.

43

Untill one day , the choice is clear , drive the mummer into the house , through the kitchen window .
:laughing: hummer , it should say hummer. lol .

44

AH HA! OUTED!

45

It is time the truth came out!!! Bill H. and David Q. are in Monaco, playing baccarat at this very moment, draped in naughty French women, gambling your deposits, yes your very musical dreams, away, forever, a whim of fancy… oh, the travesty…the humanity…

(I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!)

46

Well, there goes the neighborhood…

47

changed my mind…

48

There efforts are rewarded ,with a big fat cheque . Regarding what happens after they have sold the pipes is none of their business.Do you go and visit the house of someone who has bought one of your photographs to see if they put it in a nice frame and that it is hanging straight on the wall.

Closing an order book doesn,t address that problem ,as the career of a maker with either an open or closed book can suddenly come to an end .

To look on it in a purely business way it also doesn’t make sense .If you were to go to your bank manager looking for a loan to rebuild a workshop and told him that you closed your books because you weren’t very good at keeping up with your orders, what do you think he would say? Trouble would seem that pipemaking and good business acumen don’t go hand in hand.

RORY

49

I think Mark “Uillmann” deserves an award for the funniest post ever (a free set from a maker of his choice, plus a vacation to Fiji?).

(Someone else deserves one for beating a dead horse the longest…)

50

Its only dead when it doesn’t get up anymore,thanks to you this one has life in it yet.

RORY

51

Sorry, RB, but I think you’re way off base with this line of thinking. Because there is no UP section at Wal-Mart, we cannot sample multiple sets by multiple makers to pick and choose what we might like. One way to get an idea of the quality of a maker’s work is to see and try sets owned by others by that maker. We also look to see whose sets the higher calibre players are going for. What happens to their sets is probably the biggest form of advertising most makers can have.

djm

52

Are you absolutely certain you don’t want to close the book on this topic?

53

Probably time for this one to be put to bed, but just a few thoughts.

I think Bill H. put it well when he said that if pipemakers can more or less adhere to their agreed-upon target dates for the customers that have ordered and put in a down payment, then any other projects they toss in on the side are strictly their business. I don’t think anyone would dispute that.

What seems to have certain people’s knickers in a knot is the idea that Customer A puts in a down payment for a set of pipes and waits patiently for a number of years, but Famous Player B or Promising Youth C comes to Pipemaker X’s attention and is placed ahead in the queue. Again, it’s important to view things from the pipemaker’s perspective: most good makers are not able to turn out that many sets per year, and even if their full sets are priced at more than $8,000 US, the odds are not likely that these makers will ever be rolling in money, especially if they are helping to support a family.

I think many pipemakers are wary of what happened with a few Wooff sets that wound up on eBay a number of years back: the customers decided that they couldn’t hack it at uilleann piping and/or they could make some money off a famous maker’s name, and the sets wound up selling for two to three times as much as Geoff was charging. I had a talk with a maker in Ireland once several years ago who had two outstanding orders for full sets from customers in a country in S. America. He was perfectly willing to make the pipes, but though he felt guilty about feeling any misgivings, he couldn’t quite shake the fear that these pipes would wound up getting auctioned off on the internet a short time after their new owners (who, to his knowledge, had never attempted pipes/trad. music before) received them. Were the pipemaker’s fears unfounded and elitist? Well, yes. But there have been plenty of cases of instruments bought, paid for, and then re-sold for higher prices–usually because the maker has a long waiting list. No maker wants to work for months on a top-notch set of pipes and then see someone else profit from it at his expense. So…

-If someone comes to the maker’s attention who demonstrates personally to him that s/he is a serious player who will not pose any risk of wasting his time, that person may get a certain amount of priority because the maker knows the set will be played and looked after as it was intended to be for many years. And…

-Pipemakers may want to try and look at their projected workloads and attempt to alleviate some scenario where scores of people have sent in hundreds of dollars in down-payments each, and the maker can only turn out 6-8 full sets in a year. Closing the order books at a certain point so that a group of customers can get their orders filled relatively expediently before opening up the book again for a new group of orders may seem the best option for makers who are trying to minimize the risk of potential customers paying exorbitant prices on eBay for one of their old sets or foaming at the mouth on forums like this over the set that they ordered X number of years ago that should have been ready by now.

Pipemakers in general do not seem to be known for their acute business acumen (which may in part explain why they’re pipemakers to begin with :wink: ). Without a doubt, there have been cases of makers who have not behaved in a responsible manner toward all of their customers. Some have gotten a load of downpayments and spent them in the pub instead of on raw materials and hours of labor. Others have simply not thought realistically about the time commitments they have set themselves up for and are unable to complete their orders in a timely manner. A few, perhaps, have just been victims of extremely rotten luck. However, if I ordered a flat set from Pipemaker X and was told that the wait would be 5 years, and then some teenager in Ireland who is being hailed as one of the next great prodigies of the instrument ordered a set and got it in only a year, that wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. The best pipemakers are also trying to push the art of piping forward, and that kid is a hell of a lot more likely to do so than I am. More power to them, I say.

54

Funny, but it almost sounds here that you believe pipemakers are loaded with moola from the proceeds of their craft, like they’re a society of “fat cats” or something who love nothing better than to take money from us; especially those of us who show great promise and talent.

An interesting, but slightly flawed (if this is true) line of thought I am afraid.

55

OK ,what I should have said is that the pipemaker should make it none of his business, because he has no control what happens to the pipes once the cheque is cashed, if he was to stay mentally involved with every set he has made he will have a very stressful life Indeed.

I was just pointing out that as well as being rewarded by having a good player play their pipes ,they are also paid for their work ,which Peter had forgotten to mention.
But then if Joseph is implying that makers don’t get well paid,you would have to ask why.
How can a craftman who has a waiting time of many years not be making money ?

RORY

56

Because they compete in a musical instrument industry that regularly employs mass production and cheap labor that drives down the cost of a single instrument in an abstract sense. Try telling someone not involved in uilleann piping how much a good full set costs and they’ll think that you’re either lying or insane. Granted, the accepted price of mass-produced pianos, guitars, flutes, etc. shouldn’t have a bearing on the price of uilleann pipes, but people make the analogy anyhow (the perception of reality = reality). This means that uilleann pipe makers have to do everything to keep the relatively high price down and most do so starting with their own labor.

Another factor, of course, is demand. If there were as many uilleann pipers as violin players in the world, then (for better or worse) there would be bigger production sites employing more people (I’m sure there’d be a big factory in Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, etc.).

57

There seems to be one in Sialkot…

58

Another factor in the demand of uilleann pipes, compared to, say, guitars, is that guitars are more in demand because they have handy little metal knobs attached to gears on the end that allow the guitar to be tuned up. An enterprising and visionary pipemaker could simply solder some guitar tuners onto the end of chanter tops, resulting in pipes that would always be perfectly in tune. This, coupled with the now commonplace electric bellows, and the patented Leistman turbo vortex booster, would result in an enormous surge in worldwide demand.

59

I guess Rogge’s use of a screw to fine tune the back D is the first attempt at something like this? Sort of. (I know, I’m getting off-topic.)

60

That’s it! You are hereby sentenced to five years hard labor digging turf in the peat bog for suggesting using post 19th century technology in the production of uilleann pipes. You also must attend a self-criticism session denouncing yourself and your crime against the people.