Hello world!
Welcome to EJ’s pipe-making blog! I’ve been working on a bunch of different projects in the last few months and I thought it would be cool to start a blog to post pictures and maybe some sound and video too. It’ll be especially good to keep tabs on the production of your own set if you’re a customer who has placed an order.In a couple of days it’ll be five years since I began working on this obsession with making bagpipes that started the day after St Patrick’s day 2003. I had just finished five years of touring with my band Clandestine and wanted to do something completely different for a while. I had a couple of friends around town who had done some work making pipes in the past and they were able to give me a few important hints as to how to go about making an instrument. It turns out that there is a community of amateur, semi-professional, and professional pipe makers who have shared their knowledge to the world. It seems that the most common goal of these people is to do their best work, figure out how to be better craftspeople, and enjoy playing and making different kinds of bagpipes. At the five year mark I’m going to be playing with Clandestine again at the Mucky Duck tomorrow but this time it’ll be with a Highland pipe chanter in “A” that I made out of Mesquite a few months ago. I’ve got two interesting sets of pipes scheduled to be finished soon. One is made from Blackwood with Axis antler mounts and the other is from Osage Orange with Cocobolo mounts. Here’s a picture of the Blackwood set. It’s amazing how fingerprints can show up in a photo. There’ll be more photos in a few days when I get back to Asheville and get settled into the workshop again.