LEGO BAgpipes

[scotus-49]

Jorge - I left a comment on your wordpress blog regarding your experiments with LEGO and Bagpipes. It appears you have not seen it, so I'm hoping this might get through the 'fog'. I hope that my comment did not get lost.

Kind regards from a Scottish maker in Berlin.... who also makes and plays bagpipes (including the arduino variety...)

[JorgePe]

Hi. I replied the next day... or at least I thought I replied. The comment is approved... not sure if my blog's comments work (it has few visitors). Today I changed the fingertips (gave up using only LEGO elements for now). Sounds much better (and yet it still sounds terrible, need to find a balance on air pressure). And also burned one power adapter... motors using too much power. https://youtu.be/3DWxiGSwkDk

[scotus-49]

Hi Jorge I have not seen the comment in your blog yet. No matter - I'd like to help ifI can.

I have designed and built many different sets of Scottish bagpipes, but the most fun was using an Arduino Uno and a simple pipe with touch sensitive sensors. You could presumably adapt your mechanical Lego playing mechanism to something like this without the need for air pumping.

One thing you should be aware of - the Scottish practice chanter is designed to need a LOT of air to made it work - training the lungs etc. for the Great Highland Pipes. If you want to use an air-activated system, you would be better with a Scottish Smallpipes chanter, with cylindrical bore and a reed made from a yoghurt carton. If you have 3-D printing possibilities there are a few on Thingiverse. The Smallpipes are driven by a bellows, like the Irish bagpipes.

Check out eChanter - Gaita electrónica Open Source, who also made 3-D printing models for the chanter, available on thingiverse.

There was a very good Gaita Gallega with OpenPipe Breakout & Wavetable Synthesis with Arduino but the information is gone from the web - I have some files stored somewhere... They are now on Github though under OpenPipe Labs.

My original inspiration for the Arduino pipes was eChanter ...... an electronic bagpipe chanter anyone can build.

I have a sound file somewhere - it played very nicely, and used a plastic tube and large screws, and lots of wire to connect to the arduino. I have a lot more info - maybe I'll put it into a repo.

You can pm me if you wish on scotus at francissim dot de

Kind regards and good luck.

Francis Sim

[JorgePe]

Hi again. Slangevar! Before I started this crazy thing I found eChanter and several Arduino projects like the one you describe. I was playing with MIDI and EV3 because of other crazy project, the Laser Harp, and while testing some concepts (Raspberry Pi MIDI synth mainly) I found myself doing other LEGO MIDI instruments that my kids enjoyed (a Drum Kit and a Trumpet). With the Trumpet I tried some different free MIDI soundfonts including bagpipes. But they didn't sound like how I expected, I got the idea that good MIDI bagpipes is something for pros. But by accident I found someone making bagpipes with plastic bags and PVC tubes, then latex gloves and plastic drinking straws, balloons... hey, this is something I can do with LEGO (I already had a brute force compressor). The Great Highland Pipes was also an accident... our honeymoon was in Scotland, we made a short car tour to the north (Inverness, Skye with some distilleries in the middle) and bought a toy practice bagpipes on a store somewhere. No functional drones and the bag leaks but the chanter kind of works so I tested it with my brute force air compressor and got sound... so after quick searches on Google found practice chanters and order one. By that time I knew nothing about smallpipes and bellows (now I remember a Irish Dance show here in Lisbon with 3 guys playing bagpipes with bellows). This whole thing is just a stress release idea... making noise just because but applying some concepts I've been learning lately. I know nothing about music and I cannot distinguish two notes, real terrible with that. But my wife plays the piano a bit and sings on a chorus, she can read scores and she helps me with these things (the Laser Harp was mostly her idea). Thanks for the help offer. Also thanks for the words you wrote on my blog about BOOST, it meant a lot to me. I was not "the one" reverse engineering it, but was maybe the first with other 3 or 4 following me and we joined our findings and made something - they were much better programmers than me so I let them go on theit own, real life was calling me. These last days I have been dealing with fingertips. Sound was very bad, even I was thinking that there was something rong at low level because sounded the same with all holes closed or first hole opened (G, A). Now I got it working with non-LEGO fingertips and finally can try to play a song... but need to regulate balloon pressure - too much or too few and it sound strange (or doesn't sound at all). Also have another problem - the motors demand lots of current ant 4 motors per hub looks too much - the Technic Hub gets hot, really hot, after a few minutes. I'm draining lots of batteries so I ordered 2x PV Productions power adapters... and burned already one. I am considering moving to other motors and or hubs and also makiing my own power adapters (dummy batteries and a 9V regulted power suplly). So the roadmap is just going forward and dealing with each new finding and learning with it while making lots of noise :D

[scotus-49]

Hi Jorge - Slàinte Mhath

I see your problems with the motors.

Have you seen the Ardu McDuino: Bagpipe Playing Robot (chanter)? It has no Lego, but I'm sure that it could be converted. Full detailed instructions are on the Instructible.

There is also the McBlare: A Robotic Bagpipe Player but it's for the Highland Pipes. Youtube video here. It's a full-on robotics project from Carnegie Mellon University.

Kind Regards Francis Sim

[JorgePe]

Eh eh I am using the sequence of fingers of Ardu McDuino 'Amazing Grace' on my last video :D As I said I know zero of music... so having a score sheet of Amazing Grace is useless and the Ardu McDuino author already converted it for notes with timings. Grace notes are tough but I thing are doable... doublings and other nice things will probably never be achieved with these motors. McBlare has a good paper (Carnegie Mellon Univesity) that has pretty good information about pressure values... I found this last Saturday: "Unfortunately, the chanter tends to require lower pressure at lower pitches and higher pressure at higher pitches. At the low pitches, too high a pressure can cause the pitch to jump to the next octave or produce a warbling multiphonic effect (sometimes referred to as “gurgling”). If insufficient pressure is maintained on the chanter reed for the higher pitches, it will cease vibrating. Thus, there is a very narrow range in which the full range of the chanter is playable at a fixed pressure." The "gurgling" effect occurs when I let the balloon inflate too much.

[JorgePe]

I will publish some code in a few days so it is more easy for others to understand what I am doing. Just don't expect good programming :D

[scotus-49]

I was certain you must have seen the above two projects - they've been around for a few years now.

Re practice chanter reeds - the now widely used plastic reeds have a known tendency to make funny noises when the air pressure goes below or above optimal. It's correct that this pressure range for optimal performance seems to be quite small, and I suffered with this as an 11 year-old learning to play the pipes. Plastic reeds had only recently been developed then, and we all had to make our experiences and learn the hard way. There are some reeds with shorter blades and longer staples which are generally more stable but harder to get.

With a cylindrically bored chanter you can ignore the Highland Pipes grace notes - the GHB has a conical bore and has different acoustic characteristics. The loudness/softness/sharpness of higher/lower notes is different for cylinder/conical bores. Smallpipers tend to use "closed" fingerings, with only one hole open at a time. This might simplify your coding.

Kind Regards, and good luck with your motors.