Instruments by John Tose

I began making pipes a number of years ago shortly after Ceri Rhys Matthews started up the Welsh pipe club, Pibau Pencader. There was a demand there for instruments with a Welsh `theme’ and this demand has continued with a lot of interest across Wales and beyond. My workshop is to be found on an isolated hill farm in the Preseli mountains of North Pembrokeshire, a predominantly Welsh language area, where I also breed the rare, four-horned Hebridean sheep. About reconstructing extinct pipes… Pipe makers throughout Britain and Europe have been reconstructing various bagpipes which through the centuries have died out. In Britain David Marshall and Julian Goodacre spring to mind, but there are of course many others. There are basically two ways of going about it. Firstly, preserved instruments in museum collections may be examined, carefully measured and then copied. There are difficulties here of course- wood warps over the years, nice round bores become oval, chanters become banana shaped. Plus of course the customer may well want to play with other modern instruments, so there is the question of tuning and pitch. I have made a great many Welsh pibgyrn over the years and never have I been asked to make one with the same peculiarities of scale as those in St. Fagans. The second route is to attempt to make an instrument styled after a historic representation; church carvings, illustrations etc. Again there are problems here- just because an instrument appears in a carving in a church does not mean it is a representation of a real instrument played locally. The carving may have been done by a traveling artesan for example, or brought to the church from elsewhere. Indeed the carver may actually have had little knowledge of the instrument depicted and simply made it up as he thought fit. Another difficulty is that even assuming the work is an accurate representation, the outside of an instrument tells us little about the internal bores etc. and it is these that make the instrument, not the pretty decorations of the outside. My philosophy is to build instruments which maintain the outward style of those they are based on while basing the internal mechanics on what knowledge we do have of other historic instruments. But above all they need to be playable in todays world by modern musicians who of course have their own needs. Homepage

Welsh Pibgorn Bacbib Welsh Bag-hornpipe