“There. Hear that sound?” says Bruce Childress of Kennebunk, Maine. “That’s a very good piece of wood.” Childress, a round-faced middle aged man with glasses, graying hair and a bushy mustache, is standing in his workshop in the basement of his home. Around him are work tables covered with drill bits, pieces of wood and a variety of other tools. He is holding a rectangular block of African blackwood up to his ear and lightly tapping it with a hammer.

Childress is an uilleann (ILL-ann) pipe maker, an occupation that few outside Ireland or the Irish music scene have heard of and far fewer actually perform. Uilleann pipes are a type of bagpipes originating in Ireland. According to Breandán Breathnach, an Irish music collector and uilleann piper, the distinctly Irish pipes emerged around the beginning of the 1700s, having three distinguishing features: a bag filled by a bellows, not from a blow pipe; a chanter or melody pipe with a range of two octaves; and the addition of regulators, pipes which have keys for the piper to press in order to accompany the melody. Unlike the Scottish Highland pipes which can be produced in factories, uilleann pipes must be individually crafted by a skilled pipe maker. Childress is one of less than 40 such people in the world.


Upstairs in his office, Childress sits down to play one of the sets of pipes he has created. Simply getting set up to play the pipes is an undertaking. Childress has to strap a belt around his waist and another around his right arm to attach himself to the bellows, which he calls the “powerhouse” of the pipes. “It makes it one of the most inconvenient instruments to play in a session,” he says, referring to an informal gathering of Irish musicians. “All sessions understand the piper’s dilemma and will save a chair.” Once Childress has strapped himself in he sits down to play the pipes. He places a piece of leather over his right leg and presses the base of the chanter against it to seal off the air flow. Childress plays a few notes as he tunes his pipes, making various minute adjustments here and there. “Close enough,” he says, and launches into a traditional Irish tune. The pipes have a sweet tone, less harsh and loud than those of the Highland pipes but which still fills the room with their sound. Childress finds the pipes to be best suited to damp and rainy weather conditions, such as those over in Ireland. He once took a trip there for a music festival and described the weather as being misty and rainy. “And I swear the pipes never sounded better,” he said. “They really loved it.”

Uilleann pipes were popular in pre-famine Ireland but shortly thereafter began to die out until a cultural revival initiated by the Gaelic League, a non-governmental organization which promotes the Irish language. In 1968 Na Píobairí Uilleann (The Society of Uilleann Pipers) was founded which hopes to insure the survival of the pipes in Ireland by encouraging tuition and the study of old recordings. As of 1980, Na Píobairí Uilleann had an active membership of 280, spread throughout the world.

According to Breathnach, “since pipe music has remained largely unaltered over the past two centuries, modern sets show no radical divergence from the older makes.” However, Breathnach says that the changes which can be observed are in the methods of pipe making and the materials that are used. The uilleann pipes are a complicated instrument consisting of an amalgamation of many different materials, some from the unlikeliest of places. Childress often uses African blackwood from the forests of Mozambique or Tanzania for the chanter, German silver for the keys, Sambar stag antler from India or New Zealandand for the mounts, and many of the reeds inside the pipes are made out of the plastic from Dasani water bottles which he says hold up much better than their cane counterparts. The chanter reed itself however, is an extremely delicate and volatile piece which has to be made from cane. “This is like a doctor opening somebody’s chest, I mean it’s that sacred to a piper,” says Childress as he opens the chanter on a set of pipes to display the reed inside.

After acquiring the necessary materials, constructing the pipes can take months, according to Childress. Simply creating the right sized bore through the center of the chanter is a multi-stepped process requiring several unique tools and pieces of machinery. Childress first puts the desired piece of wood on a lathe and uses a gun drilling bit lubricated with peanut oil to drill the initial hole. He then uses drill bits of different sizes to make a stepped bore up the length of the chanter. Finally, he puts the chanter onto another lathe to even out the inside with a reamer. Childress made his reamer out of a sheet of quarter inch tool steel. However, according to Childress, it’s thought that a lot of reamers back in the late 1700s and early 1800s were French bayonets. Childress thinks this makes sense because many of the Irish gentry fought for Napoleon. “We lost at Waterloo and all we got were these stinking bayonets, we’ll have to do something with them,” he laughs.

Because pipe making is such a rare and individual craft, learning to do it can be very challenging. “I didn’t apprentice but I really bothered a lot of people. Mainly Michael MacHarg.” Childress says. Childress spent several days with the Vermont-based pipemaker just watching his techniques. “Michael called me ‘the thing that wouldn’t go away,” he says. Aside from observing pipemaker’s methods, Childress also attended many Irish music sessions and tionóls, or piper’s gatherings. “Anywhere where the pipes were gonna show up, I’d be there,” he says. “I would carry with me a notebook and a set of calipers and a ruler, and I would ask the piper if I could measure their pipes. And there was always one of two answers to that question: “hell no” or “sure, go ahead.”

Despite the delicate and precise nature of uilleann pipe making, there are some countries which have tried to mass produce them. There are some pipe making factories in Pakistan that, according to Childress are producing good Highland pipes, but even so, they just can’t seem to get the hang of the uilleann pipes. “Highland pipes, you’re forcing the sound out of those things. You’re beating the sound out of the set of Highland pipes,” says Childress. “Uilleann pipes, it’s a whole different thing. Something unique about the uilleann pipes is the set is either great or it’s awful. There’s really not much in between.”