Auld Springs Gie’s Nae Price: Making Honeymoon Bridge with Roo Geddes – by Donald WG Lindsay
The first time Roo Geddes encountered the Lindsay System chanter, it was difficult to miss.
“I vividly remember the first rehearsal where you produced those absolutely brightly coloured rainbow pipes,” Roo recalls. “I thought, ‘Oh God, what have I got myself into here?’”
This was around twelve years ago, at a rehearsal for a fundraising concert at St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow. Roo was still in his teens. We played “Lowlands”, the old song recorded by Anne Briggs, and some instrumental music. It was the beginning of a musical relationship that has continued, intermittently but steadily, ever since.
The pipes were an early red-and-yellow prototype of the extended-range Scottish smallpipe chanter I had begun developing through 3D printing. The colours were partly practical: after producing a succession of black prototypes, I needed some way of remembering which version was which. But there was a degree of showmanship involved too. The rainbow set announced itself before a note had been played.
Roo’s initial alarm did not last.
“Quite quickly, I got captured by the extended range,” he says. “I remember finding the pipe scale within my fingers—not just in the initial octave, but also in the new range that this system has.”
At that stage Roo had not played extensively with pipers. He spent time slowly exploring the scale on the fiddle, learning how the pitches sat against the drones and locating those intervals in his own hands and ears. That work became the foundation of a particular shared sound.
Listeners may not know why the fiddle, piano and pipes sometimes appear to flow into one another on Honeymoon Bridge, but they will hear it. Scottish smallpipes do not necessarily inhabit the same equal-tempered tuning system as a modern piano. Their scale is shaped by the continuous presence of the drones. Roo has learned to play into that sound: not merely alongside the chanter, but inside its intonation.
The piano presented a different challenge. For “Drunk at Night, Dry in the Morning”, Roo and Watercolour Music’s Nick Turner retuned the studio piano to meet the pipes. Nick raised an eyebrow when we asked if we might put his piano “out of tune”, then revealed that he knew exactly how to do it. The result is not an audible technical exercise. It simply feels settled: piano, chanter and drones sharing the same ground.
Roo and I had played together sporadically for a decade before finally recording a full album. In December 2024 he contributed fiddle and piano throughout my solo debut, Two Boats Under the Moon. That album was principally a collection of songs, with the guitar often providing the harmonic and rhythmic framework. The pipes appeared across it, but as one element within a larger sound.
When we returned to Watercolour Music in April 2026, the balance changed. On Honeymoon Bridge, the pipes move decisively into the foreground. In many arrangements they occupy the structural position that the guitar had held on the earlier record. The result is both a companion to Two Boats Under the Moon and a substantially different kind of album.
Roo brought his great-great-grandfather’s violin to both sessions. A surviving ticket records that instrument being played at the Kelvingrove Bandstand in 1904. It also formed the central voice of Roo’s own debut album, Close, recorded with his gran, aunt and mother and built partly from music transmitted through his Glasgow family.
That fiddle now meets an instrument whose recorded tradition is only just beginning.
For a listener accustomed to ordinary Scottish smallpipes, the most immediately unfamiliar feature of the Lindsay System is its range. In the middle register it retains the warm, buzzy voice of the smallpipes. Below the traditional scale, the sound becomes thicker, warmer and more bass-like. At the top, it passes into what I think of as a sweet falsetto. Together, those registers take the chanter across approximately two and a half octaves.
But range on paper means very little. The real question has always been what sort of music those notes can carry.
Honeymoon Bridge begins to answer that through repertoire rather than demonstration. New tunes sit beside old Scottish and Irish material, songs and melodies drawn from printed collections, recordings and oral transmission. Tunes that helped define the chanter’s early repertoire now sit inside complete musical sets, formed through the long process of playing, arranging and listening that any instrument requires.
“There’s a lot in this record,” Roo says. “It’s quite hard to pin it down. There’s music that’s pretty brand new—our own tunes—but there’s also some very, very old material and traditional material. I think it showcases the really immense capacity of this brand-new instrument.”
That mixture matters. I did not develop the chanter in order to produce a technical display-piece, or to replace the existing smallpipe chanter. Its musical identity has emerged through its contact with traditional repertoire: through asking which old tunes open naturally into the lower register, where a melody wishes to rise beyond the old nine-note compass, and what becomes possible when an accompanying musician can answer the pipes across a wider field.
The process has also moved beyond me. The downloadable LSC_PRINT&PLAY chanter has been taken up internationally, while players including Malin Lewis, Cameron Stahl and, more recently, Flynn Butler Fraser have begun finding their own music on the system. Each player’s use of it is necessarily different. That is one of the consequences—and purposes—of making the design openly available.
This summer, the Dreaming Pipes exhibition has been telling the instrument’s twenty-year development story in Stornoway, Oban and now Dundee. The exhibition contains drawings, instruments, prototypes, photographs and the work of people who have carried the system in directions I could not have planned alone. It looks backwards far enough to make visible the sustained labour behind the instrument, but its real subject is the point we have now reached.
Honeymoon Bridge is the musical counterpart to that exhibition. The exhibition describes how the instrument came into being; the album lets it get on with the business of being an instrument.
I think of the record as one proposal for its natural home: an opening body of repertoire, rather than a definitive statement. Roo goes further.
“It feels like a landmark,” he says. “It feels like the beginning of an odyssey. With the release of this record, it feels like the beginning of a much longer journey—like it’s embarking on a big adventure, and we got to be the initial launch point.”
After twelve years, that seems exactly right. We did not rush towards the album. We allowed the instrument, the repertoire and our own musical relationship time to develop. Honeymoon Bridge records the point at which those paths met.
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Honeymoon Bridge releases on Tuesday 15 September 2026.
Pre-orders available from Bandcamp.