Sholto Dobie
Sholto Dobie is a London-based home-made instrument builder of organs and bagpipes.
“Making instruments has always been a way to explore sound worlds”
I listened a lot to the video of the concert you played at the Empty Brain Resort. It sounds beautiful.
Thank you.
What is the instrument that you play at that concert? Is it a pipe organ? Is it a pipe organ you built yourself?
That instrument is a small pipe organ that I made during early days of the pandemic whilst living in Vilnius. The pipe organ was a kind of natural extension of constructing instruments for performing with, that began a few years before.
Why did you decide to build your own instrument, instead of using an existing instrument?
Making instruments has always been a way to explore sound worlds that I feel I cannot reach by other means. Often they begin with an imagined sound, the sound doesn’t exist, or maybe it does, and making the instrument would be a way to get there. Most of the time, they would fail, as I’m not a real instrument builder. But the results would have their own idiosyncrasies and limitations which would have their own logics, and dictate different musical structures and ways to perform. With other instruments I made, like the big bagpipes, I wouldn’t have very much control, and be more like a stage-hand for the instruments. Sometimes the sound was very atonal.
If you built an instrument with adhesive tape and plastic pipes, can you tune it, or is that something that doesn’t matter to you?
It depends on the context, sometimes I am happy for it to be more performative, other times I really want to convey something with the music.
What is it that you enjoy about the pipe organ sound? The sound of air?
I think it was fate that the first set of second hand pipes I got from Ebay were called “gedackt”, which means stopped. The stops in end push the pipes down an octave, and remove a lot of the harmonic content. Those ones really sound like sine tones. I guess the simplicity reveals the mechanism, the breaths, the materiality of the pipes themselves. A lot of pipes are meant to sound like something else – trumpets, horns, and suggest Angelic sounds. But I wanted the organ to have less specificity, to sound more raw like a folk instrument, less churchy.
During the concert, you put rocks on the instrument while you play pedals with your feet. Why do you put the rocks on the instrument? To make it heavier and lower the sound?
It just raises the pressure, so it pushes more air through the pipes, It also means you have to feed it more air. In general it makes it louder and raises the pitch of the pipes.
If you play this instrument in a concert situation, does this mean you have to put it together again every time you play it?
Yes. I’ve actually stopped travelling with this instrument. Till I can make some improvements (hope this doesn’t make this redundant, sorry!). I made it to travel with and it fits in two cases, but it had some rough rides.
Do you see this instrument as a combination between an organ and a bagpipe?
It’s a step in that direction. I would love to go a bit further one day.
This concert is only 20 minutes long. Why? Why a short concert?
It was never a conscious decision, but I always played for about that time. I don’t want anything to be unnecessary, and there’s only so much time people are going to enjoy me messing around with some fish pumps. I don’t really like long concerts, unless it’s the kind of thing you can step in and out of.
Joeri Bruyninckx
Headline photo: Photo by @egleagne
Sholto Dobie Instagram / SoundCloud
