Answer, Oh, what a beautiful morning!
It may have been a beautiful morning but my day evolved to equal to what that boxwood did for twenty years. The item I was searching for was the bagpipe. And no you don�t have to wear a dress but it helps because if you aren�t in tune or can�t play at least people think they know what you�re doing. The twang, flutes, banjos, pipes, drums, strings and especially fiddles of the Scotch Irish Appalachians can mimic the pipes pretty well. As to part 2. The up open pipes are, appropriately enough, called drones, there is one bass drone and two tenor drones (inside and outside), there is also the blowpipe fitted with an internal one way flap valve for filling the bag. The lower pipe is closed except for the finger holes and is called the chanter. Fingers cover the holes and the player lifts them to play a note. The pipes do not easily match the western musical scale and are hard to tune which is mostly by the perverse ear of an experienced piper. Notes are changed by lengthening or shortening the sliding connections of the drones and chanter pipes. In the summer with the heat and humidity tuning can be done as often as once every five minutes as the wood swells and shrinks. Decent pipes take as much care and maintenance as a Japanese sword. A decent set will run $6000 and maintenance every two years about half that. Bagpipes have an ancient history beyond the Highlands. They are first thought to have come from China way, then Samaria, Egypt, Greece. Most of Europe had pipes, and surprisingly to me the French used them. Different pipe sounds of lands other than Scotland can be found at http://www.hotpipes.com/album.html. Also pipes were considered a weapon of war and were banned by the English as pipes were used to summon the various clans to battle. I�ll admit you do hear them from quite a distance. If you heard a lot of them coming from different directions it might give you pause.
Finally, building these things sounds like a task and a half. Wood seasoning, inside bore tapering, no standard fingering distances, leather selection, seasoning and sealing, reed shapes, sliding wood tuning. When reading about building these, with typical understatement is the quote �first is a suitably equipped lathe.� The author then goes into five single spaced pages of how he suitably equipped a lathe to do the work. Enough already I�ll think of something else for next week.
