Our story 10 years on; Part 2
In this second part of our story, I will discuss the design process. I think it’s important that people understand why our instruments are the way they are. It’s not an accident. To drive the design process, all the instruments started off with a list of criteria that we were looking for. For example; Smallpipes, we wanted them to be mellow, but with a rich harmony. Be loud enough as a solo instrument, but quiet enough to be played in a room so that people could still have a conversation over the top of them.
First, I make some sketches and calculations of air flow, component lengths to suit the key etc. Then make prototypes by developing the drones. These are what we call sounding sets that have the bores, slides and chambers without any external shapes.
Once made, the sounding sets are sent to the reed maker for reeds to be produced to make the sound we were looking for and the key we were aiming to produce. Once we got the sounding drones back with the reeds, we made some minor adjustments until we were happy with the sound we were looking for. Then we moved on to the chanter. We decided to design the chanters around standard reeds that were available at the time. The idea behind that was that the player was not dependent on us as makers for reeds and could buy reeds from other sources and they should work in our instruments.
The drone reeds were always going to be synthetic because of consistency and like the chanter reeds available almost anywhere in the world. Our design of our C and D Smallpipes is an example of how we approached things differently. Our C and D sets are designed to use our key of “A” Smallpipes chanter reed and synthetic drone reeds.
Once we were happy with the sound of our pipes we applied the design of the external shapes, mounts and ferrules. We wanted them to look modern and sleek. As well as looking good we wanted them to feel good in the hands of the players. Comfort and function and above all an instrument the owner would want to play over and over again.
We started production with the aim of reducing the delivery time for instruments. We did this by applying standard Industrial manufacturing techniques. Reducing the materials used to African blackwood with titanium mounts and ferrules.
Next time I will discuss; the manufacturing process.
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