He arranged a meeting with Andrew McPherson, an American expert in digital musical instruments who had recently taken up a post lecturing and performing research at QMUL. The next year, as Menzies was figuring out what his PhD project should focus on, his digital chanter came to mind. However, the parameters of his university course meant he was soon nudged onto another project, and his digital chanter was put on the back burner.
Handless bagpipe player ghost full#
Menzies built his prototype in a day and a half, taking full advantage of the ease of development afforded to him by the Arduino hardware. “So, I did a first version of it with an Arduino, just for a bit of a laugh, for one of these practical projects.”įor the uninitiated, a chanter is the part of bagpipes that bears the fingerholes, which allow the piper to play a melody. “I always thought it would be cool to bodge up a digital bagpipe chanter, because I’d been playing the pipes for quite a while,” he explained. This initiative mandated he spend a year experimenting with various practical projects before his PhD started in earnest. He received funding for his studies via the university’s Media and Arts Technology program. “I badgered my parents for long enough that I eventually got some bagpipe lessons, and it all went from there.”Ī decade later, he completed a Masters in Electronics with Music at the University of Glasgow, and journeyed south to London to begin a PhD course at Queen Mary University London. “So I badgered my parents for long enough that I eventually got some bagpipe lessons, and it all went from there.” “I was like, ‘yep, I want to do that,’” Menzies told Digital Trends in a phone call last month. When Menzies was ten, he saw them playing with a “child prodigy” called Hamish Munro, a local teenager who had an amazing talent for playing the bagpipes. The Fiddlers weren’t limited to the instruments for which they are named. That’s when he started playing the fiddle, a pursuit that would spur on his desire to join a local group known as the Fochabers Fiddlers. Pipe Dreamĭuncan Menzies’ initiation into Scottish folk music came when he was seven years old. To make that goal a reality, he’s augmenting traditional methods in place for generations with emerging technology available only in the past decade. Menzies wants to give learners better insight into what they’re getting right, what they’re getting wrong, and make those first steps less frustrating. Experienced players aren’t easy to find, which led Menzies to worry the bagpipes might one day die out. Yet even the instrument’s basics are difficult to master, which leads many budding pipers to give up before they’ve made much progress. Highland bagpipes are an important part of Scotland’s cultural heritage, dating back to a proud military tradition, and are still in vogue among contemporary folk musicians. Then, in his twenties, he decided to change the way others learn to play the instrument. He was successful - after years of incredibly trying practice. When Duncan Menzies was young (a Scot might say wee) he decided he wanted to learn to play the bagpipes.
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