So I’ve been getting into playing Medieval music with some friends of mine and lo there are lots of weird sounding bagpipes in this scene. I’ve got this band that plays some medieval music called Teribus and we were playing a show up in Cincinnati last weekend. A friend of mine name Al Cofrin in another band called Istanpitta has a set of these German bagpipes that sound kind of like a dull Highland pipe. Well he needed a new bag on his set so I thought I’d try to make him one. The problem is: on these historic instruments all the bags seem to be turned inside out, for what reason I can’t imagine since it makes the instrument uncomfortable to play and as you’ll see in the photo one has to be careful when making such a bag that it can in fact be inverted through the chanter stock. No doubt there is a simple and elegant method of making these bags so that what you see below doesn’t happen every time. What a pain! I had the thing in the form of a half inside out loaf of leather for about an hour until Kevin gave me a hand and we were both able to finish the job of turning it inside out. Next time I’ll make the chanter stock bigger of course but I might just take some license and leave the seam on the outside since I have yet to encounter one of these seam-on-the-inside bagpipes that wasn’t very awkward to play.