Nathaniel Banton ’00 makes stirring music and a leads a devout following with his hand-crafted bagpipes

Story and photo by Marc Glass

Playing a set of smallpipes, Nathaniel Banton ’00 is a musician at one with his music. As though meditating, with eyes closed and head bowed, he slowly pumps the leather bellows tucked between his hip and right arm, while gently compressing the velvet-clad bag under his left. And when the flow of air is just right, his fingers swiftly dance over the chanter holes, sounding stirring notes with precision.



Some musicians like their instruments enough to name them. Banton adores bagpipes enough to craft them by hand, painstakingly, one set at a time. And, given his backlog of orders, those eager to pay upwards of $2,000 for a set made in his Queens, N.Y., workshop will wait five months before taking delivery.

“I put a lot of my love of playing into every set I make. I honestly don’t like it when it comes time to send the pipes out,” says the Waterville, Maine, native. “By the time they leave my shop, they’re perfect in every way I can make them.”

Producing notes that are warmer, quieter, and pitched for playing in pubs with fiddles and tin whistles, the bellows-blown smallpipes are, Banton says, a “more social instrument” than the larger, more recognizable highland pipes.

“Even if you could play [another instrument] loud enough to be heard with highland pipes,” he explains, “they’re out of pitch for accompaniment.”

Despite this fact, Banton says his love of playing and making pipes was inspired by the booming highland sound. He had never played a musical instrument before his college freshman year, when his mother, recalling how much he enjoyed hearing the highland pipes played at the Maine Highland Games in Brunswick, purchased him a practice chanter, the bag-less lone pipe used for rehearsing finger positioning.

“It only has nine notes, so learning sheet music was pretty simple,” says Banton, who taught himself to play at UMF.

With $700 earned working at a summer camp, Banton bought a used set of highland pipes at the beginning of his sophomore year. “They were so loud,” he recalls, “I couldn’t practice in my dorm room or outside, even when the weather was good.”

Nordica Auditorium, he reasoned, was the only campus room big enough to contain the sound. Thinking his teacher might help, he asked Phil Carlsen, professor of music, about the possibility of after-hours practice sessions. “He made me promise not to show up before the building had completely cleared out,” Banton recalls. “So I wound up practicing most nights from ten o’clock to midnight.”

And by driving to Ellsworth every Thursday night for study with the pipe major of the Maine St. Andrew’s Pipes and Drums band, Banton, who majored in English and creative writing at UMF, gave himself an unofficial minor in bagpipe playing.

After graduation, Banton briefly worked at a now-defunct Fairfield-based customer-service call center. Before long, and with dreams of making bagpipes swirling in his head, he happily tendered his resignation. Then, the summer camp that unwittingly funded his set of highland pipes offered him a winter caretaker’s position with free housing. After chores were done, Banton would experiment with casting chanters from polyester resin poured in crude molds.

Cognizant of exactly how much he didn’t know, and, more important, how much he wanted to learn, he sent 40 letters in search of a bagpipe-making apprenticeship. Seth Gallagher, a pipe maker from Cold Spring, N.Y., said yes.

“I had to commit to working for him for three years in a gentleman’s agreement,” Banton recalls. The decision was more than easy. “It was perfect. I learned above and beyond what I would need to know.”

After his term was up, Banton worked as a stone mason in Maine to save for tools, including a drill press, band saw, and a lathe. He then returned to the borough of Queens, close to where his girlfriend is a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School. In his bungalow basement workshop, where he now spends eight hours a day turning exotic woods and custom building reeds and chanters, Banton has become the domestic maker of must-own bagpipes. (Neil Anderson, called the “Jimi Hendrix of the highland bagpipe” by the Washington Times, plays a set of border pipes custom made by Banton.)

“The buy-only-Scottish bias is changing,” says Banton. “If you’re going to buy small and border pipes in the U.S., increasingly, I’m the answer.”



Banton says there’s an unspoken agreement in the pipe-making community not to “copy a living maker’s pipes.” Given his distinctive wood choices (perhaps African blackwood, which produces an especially bright sound for a rock-band player, or mesquite, which produces a softer sound for a pub player), hardware options (stainless steel, sterling silver, or gold-plate), unique chanter-bore designs, and decorative mounts lathed from moose antler, Banton needn’t worry about imitation. Instead, he focuses on improving his constructions.

“The way I approach pipe making is I assume it can always be better,” he says. “I’d like to get to a point where people thought about my pipes this way: If the house is on fire, get the kids out first, but then grab the pipes! There’s no way I would stop making the instruments if that were the case.”

Learn more about Banton’s bagpipes and hear them played at www.elbowmusic.com