Lindsay System Chanter : Information

An early full set of Lindsay System Scottish smallpipes

The core project of Lindstruments at its inception was the Lindsay System chanter for Scottish Smallpipes. This is a keyless extended range nominal "A" chanter, which makes use of a return bore both to extend the range downwards to low D, and to bridge the register gap present in the smallpipes (as in all "cylindrical" reeds).

The project arose out of research that began in 2005, with the return-bore design finally being proven in early 2013. From there, a Kickstarter project ran during March/April 2014, to finance the purchase of 3D printers and filament and facilitate more intensive work on the chanter and a set of drones to support it.

By December 2014, the version 1.0 Beta chanter had been distributed to backer-testers, following which version 2.0 was resolved by November 2015. 

A professional video, "Chanter 2" was released on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram in December 2017 to coincide with a feature on the project that ran in the January 2018 edition of "Piping Today", the magazine of The National Piping Centre. The video shows some of the range and potential of the chanter, and can be viewed below.

The project gathered pace in 2018, during which year a collaboration with Skye piper Malin Lewis resulted in their turning the first wooden iteration of the chanter in laburnum at their home workshop in Skeabost Bridge, Isle of Skye.

In late 2018, two early prototype sets of Lindsay System Scottish smallpipes - including the multi-coloured "Rainbow Set of Pollok" which was used to record "Chanter 2" (see below) - were incorporated into the collection of the Museum of Piping, at the National Piping Centre in Cowcaddens, Glasgow.

In summer 2019, the open source plans for the Lindsay System Chanter were published in full in the Piping Today magazine, while Malin Lewis and Uilleann piper Jarlath Henderson presented the show "Two Octaves" to a sold-out Piping Centre during Piping Live 2019. 

In early 2020, following a second sold-out "Two Octaves" during Celtic Connections 2020, in March Zexuan Qiao and Donald WG Lindsay collaborated remotely between London and Ascension Island, South Atlantic (where Donald was resident from August 2019 to May 2022) to create a home-3D-printable, downloadable, free version of the Lindsay System Chanter titled LSC_PRINT&PLAY. This file set can be found and downloaded free of charge from the sharing website www.thingiverse.com and while not full-featured, it allows the core range from low D to high B.

This free-to-download file set has opened access to the design up to anyone with access to a 3D printer, and to date (Sat 5th Oct 2024) has been downloaded a total of 2475 times. If even ten percent of these downloads has resulted in at least one playable instrument, then this new design already has a substantial community of players. Add those chanters we know have been manufactured by one of the three currently known professional makers, and the possibility arises that there are already somewhere between 500 - 1,000 active players of the Lindsay System worldwide.

The chanter's involvement in the field of professional performance and recording has continued to develop. 2024 has seen UK tours by Malin Lewis, following the release of their acclaimed album Halocline, and by Donald WG Lindsay, in collaboration with renowned traditional singer & songwriter Alasdair Roberts.

To date (and to our knowledge), the Lindsay System Chanter has featured on film soundtracks including My Old School (2022), Being in a Place (2023), and The Outrun (2024). All three of these films have received critical acclaim and awards.

The chanter has so far featured on albums including Seeds of Life (Kirsty Potts 2015), This is Not a Lament (Richard Youngs 2017), Strange Bedfellows (Kendal Fortson 2019), History of Sleep (Donald WG Lindsay & Richard Youngs 2020), Halocline (Malin Lewis 2024), and the self titled Donald WG Lindsay & Alasdair Roberts (2024).

Halocline in particular has been singled out for critical acclaim, and deservedly so. Malin's is the first album of Scottish traditional music to foreground the Lindsay System Chanter, and presents a set of brilliantly performed & freshly composed new music, perfectly adapted to the new instrument.

 The main features of the design of the Lindsay System Chanter are ;

- Ability to access a second register (High B, High C#, High D, and beyond)

- Access to additional notes below the scale, by use of a "back-bore" (Low F#, Low E, Low D)

- Access to semitones within the range (Bb, C, Eb, F, G#, High Bb)

- No requirement for keywork

- No effective alteration made to the basic "A Chanter" scale, so no new technique needs to be learnt in order to play your existing repertoire.

- Despite being a nominal "A" chanter, the chanter's two octave range begins on a low "D" (below low G). It is capable of playing music in the keys of D & G within that range, in addition to the familiar Scottish pipe modes of "A", and many other scales & modes. See further down this page for samples of some of the many scales that this chanter can provide.

- Access to a musical range compatible with that of the Uilleann pipes, Northumbrian Smallpipes, the Whistle, Wooden Flute, and the top three strings of Fiddle, Mandolin, Banjo - up to and beyond third position on the fiddle.

And the interesting thing is - this is just the 'working' range. The chanter has  an 'untamed' octave at least, above and beyond this for the adventurous player to explore!

If you're a piper, and particularly if you understand something of the principles of acoustics as they apply to a Smallpipes chanter, this will all sound 'too good to be true', in which case I recommend you watch the video provided here for a demonstration of the chanter and its capabilities.

More videos can be accessed in the "About" section of this site.

Lindsay System Chanter - Sound Samples :

The chanter has been in development for several years, and the research that gave rise to this design has been ongoing for more than a decade at time of writing. The process of finalising the design went into 'top gear' in 2014 following the success of the "Dreaming Pipes" project on Kickstarter, which culminated in the production of 20 Version 1.0 "Beta" chanters, sent out to 20 project backers, who also each received a Version 2.0 chanter on completion of the project.