‘There are no short cuts in handcrafting a set of uilleann pipes’

Derrick Gleeson vividly remembers the beginning of his obsession with uilleann pipes. He was nine years old and in the kitchen of his parents’ pub, four miles from Miltown Malbay in Co Clare and well known for its traditional music heritage. Master uillean pipe player Liam O’Flynn had been asked to play.

“He was shown into the kitchen to get himself together and played a set there. I was gobsmacked,” says Gleeson.

Despite growing up to play a range of instruments, across genres including not just trad but blues and jazz, those pipes that night changed the course of Gleeson’s life.

“It gets under your skin like nothing else,” he explains.

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“The uilleann pipes are one of the few instruments that you wear. You have to strap it to your body. It’s right up against your chest and belly and the whole thing vibrates. It’s kind of ethereal. It gets into your subconscious and takes you places.”

For the young Gleeson, there was just one problem – getting his hands on some.

“Uilleann pipes were like hens’ teeth – they were really difficult to come by,” he says.

Very few people were making them, and with good reason.

“Pipe making was always a tenuous way to make a living, and it still is. It’s so time consuming to do but there’s a limit to what you can charge,” he adds.

After school Gleeson moved to the United States, worked in carpentry by day and in bands by night. He came home in 1998 and soon after that had a second most fortuitous meeting in his parents’ bar, this time with famous pipe maker Geoff Wooff.

“Geoff is the premier pipe maker in my field, which is narrow bore classic uilleann pipes,” says Gleeson.

There are two types of uilleann pipes, wide bore concert pitch and narrow bore classic.

“The concert pitch is more of a session instrument. The narrow bore is more of a parlour instrument, much quieter and mainly played solo or with a fiddle player,” he explains.

It’s the sound of the instrument, the drones, that he loves; “It either hits you or it doesn’t, on a molecular level. The old-style narrow bore pipes are sweeter in style. There is nothing like them.”

Gleeson “plagued Wooff” for two years to make him a set.

“He gave me a chanter to practice on, so I was playing away on that and learning about pipes in the meantime,” he recalls.

Once he got his set he began to teach himself how to replicate them, starting with reeds and progressing from there.

“I would bring them to Geoff and he was extremely generous with his time. We’d go through each piece and I’d come away with a list as long as my arm about what I needed to do. He never plámásed me, was always very honest. So, over time, I improved,” he says.

In 2009, after his parents had closed the bar and retired, he converted half of the space into a workshop to concentrate on making uilleann pipes full time.

And concentrated work it is. “A set of pipes is an awful lot of steps done well. Any short cuts and you’ll pay for them later,” he says. “There are some days I go into the workshop and think, ‘not today’, just because you have to focus so hard on everything.”

Uilleann pipes are traditionally made of woods such as African blackwood, ebony and boxwood, with some also featuring fruitwood such as apple, plum and pear. The ebony he uses is heavily regulated and Rainforest Alliance approved. It needs to be so dense that he has to keep it for 10 years to dry.

He works with German nickel silver for the keys and tubing, sheets of which have to be hand rolled on mandrels before silver soldering and polishing. Every element of his pipes is handmade, right down the springs. Bellows are made of wood and leather treated to be airtight.

“When you make a set of pipes you are only halfway there,” he points out. “You then start tuning, voicing, making different reeds that agree with each other. They have to be well in tune, with a good tone, project well and have good harmonics. That’s the trade; it comes in two part.”

A single set of uilleann pipes, from wood selection to handover, takes 600 hours of work. Although each set costs thousands of euro, by rights they should cost much more, given the skill and intensity of the craft involved.

Gleeson believes that, as a folk instrument, uilleann pipes suffer in comparison to classical instruments, which command high prices. His beautifully handcrafted pipes may one day be valued on a par with a Steinway or Stradivarius, but unfortunately not just yet.

“There’s very little money in it,” he says. “My wife once went looking for my per hour pay once and I said: ‘Don’t tell me; I don’t want to know.’ But I do know it’s well below the minimum wage.”

On the plus side, his pipes are in such demand that he has a five-year waiting list of clients from all around the world.

He doesn’t take a deposit until he is a year away from handover and can provide those starting out with a range of options, including a practice set made up of chanter, bag and bellows or a half set which includes drones. A three-quarter set includes two regulators while a full set includes all of the above plus the bass regulator.

I’m doing this the way the old boys did it. All this work would be very recognisable to someone stepping out from 1900

—  Derrick Gleeson

It doesn’t help that costs have skyrocketed in the past two years, with the price of German silver nickel alone increasing by 300 per cent.

“Sandpaper, glues, drill bits, leather, wood – all have gone through the roof,” Gleeson says.

But despite the higher costs, he has no intention of downgrading his materials. “I’m doing this the way the old boys did it,” he says. “All this work would be very recognisable to someone stepping out from 1900. There are people out there interested in mass producing. Not me.”

Understandably, given the amount of work Gleeson puts into his instruments, he has a strong affinity for them.

“I’ve never made two sets of pipes that were the exact same. Each instrument is an individual,” he says. “What really gets my blood boiling is when someone buys an instrument and brings it back in poor condition. It drives me cuckoo because if it’s looked after it will last for generations.”

It is without doubt a labour of love.

“People who hand-make instruments now are up against machinery and automation. A lot of people don’t understand what goes into hand making, because they don’t see it,” says Gleeson.

“But as Geoff Wooff says, if the instrument looks beautiful, feels beautiful, and plays beautiful, then you really have something. That’s the holy trinity.”