How this started
I started BagpipeLessons.com in 2001, when the internet was still new and nobody knew what it would become, with what was, at the time, a far-fetched dream: that I could use the internet to help people learn the bagpipes and play better.
In 2003 I began teaching bagpipe lessons online — as far as I know, I was the first piper to teach one-on-one video lessons over the internet. My own teacher, Mike Cusack, lived in Houston and I lived in Seattle, so I bought two of Apple's new webcams, sent him one, and we had what I believe was the first bagpipe lesson ever taught over the internet — with me as the student. That same day I put a note on my website saying I was offering lessons the same way.
The years after that were a long stretch of trying things. Tune lesson downloads. Video lessons. Sheet music and MP3s. In-person workshops, private lessons, and teaching bands all over the world. In January 2012 the New York Times ran a front-page story about online music lessons and used me and one of my students as the example, and I've been on the front page of American Profile too — both still surprise me when I think about it.
In 2011 I built an online lesson library and called it the BagpipeLessons.com Studio. It began as a 30-day challenge on my blog, and I put the whole thing together remotely, because I was living abroad at the time. It grew slowly and steadily for years. Then in 2020 I started teaching live classes, and everything changed — the classes brought people together every week, and each one became a permanent lesson in the library a few days later.
Today, on top of all that lesson content, there are hundreds of hours of live Zoom classes, and every one of them can be watched on replay. The problem was that finding your way around it had gotten harder every single year. So I rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up: searchable, indexable, findable. Courses, topic guides, highlights, video compilations, a place to ask a question about anything, and a community you can actually talk to.
Why I built the Inner Circle
The bagpipe is a hard instrument, and most pipers learn it more or less alone. You hit a problem on a Tuesday night — a reed that won't settle, a movement that won't come out clean, a tune you can't make sound like music — and there's nobody to ask. That's the thing I've wanted to fix for twenty-five years.
So here is my promise to you. Never again will you have a bagpipe question you can't get answered.
This is the fulfillment of a 25-year dream: the world's most comprehensive, most detailed, easiest-to-use website for pipers of any level who want high-quality information from a source they can trust — on your computer or your phone, anywhere in the world. It's for the beginner who wants to be shown the right way from the start, for the band piper who wants to hold up their end, for the competitor chasing a prize, and for the piper who just loves the music and wants to keep getting better. As a member you get a live class with me every week, answers from me, a worldwide community of pipers, and the whole library.
What's inside
687 lessons and class replays, 105 complete tune packages, 63 topic guides, 48 courses, and more than 12,000 searchable moments — type what you're working on and land on the exact minute I taught it. Plus a live class with me every week, recorded and added here a few days later.
A little about me
I grew up piping. It was the first thing in my life I never had to be reminded to practice. My first teacher was Colin MacKenzie, and I was lucky to learn from some remarkable pipers along the way too, including the late Pipe Major Alasdair Gillies and Mike Cusack. As a teenager I was certain I was going to medical school. I studied biology and chemistry, then earned my B.A. in Psychology — with a focus on learning and music — from the University of Puget Sound, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and somewhere in my third year I knew my life was going in a different direction.
I moved to Seattle, where I still live with my wife and our two sons, and I've been teaching, performing, competing, and building things for pipers full time ever since — more than thirty years playing and teaching now. I'm a three-time World Pipe Band Champion with the Simon Fraser University Pipe Band and a four-time U.S. Gold Medal winner, with prizes at the Argyllshire Gathering, the Northern Meeting, the Cowal Highland Gathering, and the Braemar Gathering. I've performed at the Sydney Opera House, Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, and New York's Lincoln Center, played alongside the Chieftains and Bob Weir, and recorded an album, Bagpipe Revolution.
I'm also an inventor with several patents, mostly because I get bothered by things that don't work the way they should. That's where the Tone Protector Chanter Cap and Reed Case, the Piper's Metronome™ app, the Bagpipe Gauge, the InTune Mic, the Endurance Practice Chanter (made by R.G. Hardie & Co.), the Piper's Advantage Bagpipe Phone Mount, the Foundation Reed, the Piper's Ultimate Reed Poker, the Perfect Angle Blowpipe Positioner, and my custom pipe bags all came from — PipesDrums named one of them its Product of the Year and another its Runner-Up Product of the Decade. It's also where the World Online Piping & Drumming Championships came from, which I founded in 2011 — I wanted pipers and drummers to be able to compete and get real written feedback from world-class judges without getting on a plane.
The thread through all of it is the same: find what actually works, and then find a way to hand it to as many pipers as possible.
Come and join me
Twenty-five years in, I still love this. If you want help becoming the piper you want to be, I'd be glad to have you with us.
Already a member? Members: start here →
And if you ever can't find something, ask me — on the Q&A page or in a live class.
Happy Piping! — Jori Chisholm, Founder, BagpipeLessons.com