I’ve always loved the bagpipes for their portability. And since they’re so portable, I’ve been lucky to have played them in tons of places over the years. My favorites start with playing at the beach in Carlsbad, CA. I would walk out on the jettys at Tamarack and play for the surfers and the fish. I enjoyed playing all over San Francisco with the Wharf and Union Square being the most fun and where I have many interesting stories during my busking days.
I could fill blogs and blogs with stories of bagpiping over the years. But since I visited the Tank and had the wonderous experience of hearing my pipes in that big steel reverb machine, I’ve been thinking about interesting sonic spaces. There are a couple that come to mind immediately. Our band used to practice at the National Guard Armory in Commerce City. It was a big building built to house the members of the guard doing whatever they do. But they had this awesome locker room with one of those big communal showers, similar to the picture below.
Except it was all cinder-block cement. I would go into the shower room and warm up before practice. The echo was crazy but it sounded so cool! No one in the band is with the Guard any longer so we lost that practice space unfortunately.
There’s also a tunnel under Alameda that leads to the dog park at Forsberg-Iron spring park. Every time I walk my puppers through that tunnel I think, “this would be a great place to play the bagpipes.”
So I’ve been thinking about starting a project to record the pipes in sonically interesting spaces. Parking garages, churches, building stairways. What do you think? If anyone ever reads this, I’d love to hear some ideas on cool places to play the bagpipes.
