WARBL on a bagpipe

waltercool · Post by **waltercool** » Tue Mar 19, 2024 9:08 pm

Hi everyone.

After doing couple of experiments in past, this is something it works quite good actually.

First of all, I got a goose bagpipe, many providers offer the same one. I got it from thepipershut around 170USD with a highland practice chanter included. I'm sure you can also use the Twist-Trap Goose Pipes, it's cooler but more expensive.

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You can try to build the bagpipe by yourself, but may be more expensive. You don't see stocks cheaper than 50USD.
You can always buy a 37USD cheap goose pipe from eBay, but good luck! YGWYG

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Secondly, the chanter.

I tried several valves to control airflow, but seems like the 3D model provided with the WARBL actually does an excellent job managing air pressure.

There are 3 ways to do this.
- Add some air leak at blowpipe. This is a very bad idea as you can't inflate and get air leaks at same time.
- Add some air leak at bagpipe. This is how Redpipes work and might require doing holes into your air-tight bag.
- Add some air leak at the chanter part.

I tried adding an aquarium valve, but getting acceptable air leak means your WARBL will lose ton of air pressure. (I can only attach 3 images max) and you get pressure around 1.1 and 1.5 regardless of your arm force. Most of the air gets leaked through the valve.

So, what I did was attaching the WARBL mouthpiece. It works fantastic as it uses something close to a Tesla valve.

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Third: How do you fit the WARBL mouthpiece into the chanter stock?

Goose Practice Chanter uses a smaller radius than regular Bagpipes, the size is "almost the same" but needs something else. Here I added some electrical tape (bagpipe tape may work) to fill just below the air escape. It fits wonderful. Just make sure the tape doesn't leave any free spot. The circle is almost perfect at that part.

The reason the WARBL mouthpiece is inverted, it's because of the angle. Just adding tape makes the chanter to get a small angle (and I don't like that).

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As people who play bagpipes knows, the WARBL mouthpiece leaks ton of air, it's not specifically for bagpipes but other air instruments as well. To reduce this, I just added some extra tape to reduce the amount of air. Maybe you can use small amount of fire to modify plastic structure, but tape is a reversible modification. I prefer that personally.

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Bonus:

- After all those changes, you can still use the same mouthpiece and play normally.
- If you are playing with your phone connected to WARBL, likely you can put your phone inside the bag cover, even you could attach some small speaker.