Piping Workshop – Kenora Legion, Kenora, Ontario – January 28, 2023

On January 28, 2023 the Kenora Scottish held an all-day piping workshop at the Kenora Legion. Wes Sheppard from the Winnipeg St. Andrews Pipe Band (and former Kenora Scottish PM) led the workshop. The workshop had two main focuses – pipe maintenance and running pipe band practices.

In the 1st part of the workshop pipes were inspected and where there were maintenance issue, Wes directed individual pipers on how to correct those issues. Most of the issues revolved around chanter and drone reeds. Most everyone got new pipe chanter reeds and were then instructed on how to break them in efficiently, including the use of elastic bands, how to pinch and/or how to shave a reed properly.

In the 2nd part of the workshop, Wes took us through the process of how to tune the band for a practice or a performance. It started with finding a set of pipes whose chanter seemed to be in tune by ear and then tuning the drones to match. We then learned how to take a reading from the standard set of drones to then tune the drones for the rest of the band using the electronic tuner. The next step was then fine tuning the chanters to match the sound of the drones – by either adding or removing tape from certain sound holes or by setting the chanter reed deeper or shallower as the case may be.

We all sounded a whole lot better at the end of the workshop and we’re hoping to run more of these workshops with Wes and other instructors in the coming year.