I just received the sad news that Colin Ross has died.
He was a legend as Northumbrian piper as well as pipemaker.
Back in the 1980s I got into the NSP for a time and I purchased a beautiful boxwood set in D from Colin.
Needless to say the set was perfection.
About the timeline for the style of modern SSPs made by NSP makers, which are essentially an open-ended keyless NSP chanter with the holes arranged to produce a Mixolydian scale, the Burleigh catalogue I saw c1980 offered those. I don’t know if those were a recent response to Colin’s SSP, or something Burleigh had been offering already.