Water Manometer and the Bagpipes

I built a water manometer a while back thanks to instructions from Doctor John. I'm lucky to know Doctor John as we both play in the Fountain Trust Pipe Band. I'm still just playing with them at practices and for parade gigs while I learn the contest repertoire and improve my piping skills to the level the band needs for the contest circle.

The water manometer is useful to provide a visual representation of the air pressure in the bag for what we call "steady blowing". Ideally the water level in the manometer won't bounce up and down too much while playing the pipes, but even world class professionals will have some subtle variation. At this point I'm just happy if the water doesn't shoot out the top of the contraption between breaths.

I'm finding that there are two phases (all Arm or Arm+Diaphragm) during four steps of blowing the pipes:

1. Transition from Arm to Arm+Diaphragm
2. Blowing in
3. Transition from Arm+Diaphragm to Arm
4. Inhaling

The biggest waver in air pressure for me is in the two transitions, I don't transition smoothly yet. I was able to place the upper and lower measures (two loops of red rope) on the manometer to roughly bound the high pressure peak and low pressure valley. I'm happy that the peak and valley are only two and a half inches apart during the transitions. Between transitions I only waver about one inch and I'm pretty happy with that as a starting point as that indicates that I have a reasonably steady arm.

On a related note, I've started to hear the tuning of individual notes on the chanter against the drones. I can't yet tell by ear if the chanter note is sharp or flat relative to the drones, but I can hear when that note is off pitch. This is something that I learned about at Davidson Scottish Arts Academy earlier this year; when tuning I should be aiming to tune the instrument to itself. When tuning, listen to the chanter notes against the drones and adjust as needed. I'm a slow learner, so I needed to learn what to listen for first, then it took me time to recognize what I was hearing was what I was listening for.