Touring exhibition to visit venues across Scotland in 2026
A new touring exhibition tracing the first ten years of the Lindsay System will visit venues across Scotland in 2026, bringing together instrument design, live music, making, research and public engagement in a project rooted in the living traditions of Scottish bellows piping.
Dreaming Pipes: Ten Years of the Lindsay System follows the first decade of the Lindsay System in public use: the open-source, extended-range, keyless Scottish smallpipe chanter design created by musician and instrument designer Donald WG Lindsay. Through prototypes, diagrams, instruments, text, sound and film, the exhibition places the Lindsay System within the wider modern story of Scottish smallpipes, shaped by a simple musical question: how can pipers carry what they already know into fuller participation in the music around them without having to start over from scratch? It shows how the Lindsay System answers that question in its own way: by making a greatly extended melodic range musically and physically workable without keys, while preserving a secure centre of familiar piping technique from which players can extend outward.
The exhibition traces not only the development of the instrument itself, but the wider culture of use, adaptation and exchange that has grown around it: from early uptake by players and makers, to the shareable, 3D-printable LSC_PRINT&PLAY and new access through digital fabrication, to experiments in new and recycled materials, pedagogical use, and the translation of the design back into wood through traditional craft methods. Rooted in both bellows-piping tradition and contemporary maker culture, Dreaming Pipes presents the Lindsay System as part of a living open process within Scottish smallpipes more broadly.
The tour opens at An Lanntair, Stornoway, before continuing to The Rockfield Centre, Oban and Dundee Central Library, with a further late-summer Glasgow exhibition presentation in development.
Alongside the exhibition itself, the wider 2026 programme includes a public smallpipes workshop in Skye and an appearance at the Orkney International Science Festival in September, extending the project into teaching, performance, design and wider public discussion.
At the centre of the exhibition is a simple but far-reaching idea: that there should be a way for pipers to carry hard-won musical knowledge across a wider melodic range and repertoire without having to start again from scratch. The Lindsay System gives that idea material form. Developed through long practical making, musical use and open exchange, it has moved from experimental prototype to a working musical system, now active in performance, teaching, recording, and instrument design and making.
For Lindsay, the exhibition is not simply about a new instrument, but about a wider cultural and musical process: the continuing attempt to widen what pipers can do musically without asking them to leave hard-won technique and confidence behind.
“The Lindsay System began as a practical piping question, but over time it has become a much broader one: about design, sound, repertoire, handcraft, teaching, and the future life of bellows piping. This exhibition follows that process in public.”
The 2026 tour also connects with From Shore to Score, Lindsay’s collaborative work with Tern360. Based in Orkney, Tern360 works at the intersection of ocean plastics, circular economy and community engagement, recovering plastic waste from Scottish waters and transforming it into cultural objects. Through this strand of work we make a direct argument through making: that material written off as waste can become craft, culture and music, placing the Lindsay System within a wider Scottish conversation about what we discard, what we value, and what can be remade.
Donald WG Lindsay is a Scottish singer, piper, songwriter and instrument designer whose work moves between traditional music, original song, open-source instrument development and longform artistic research. His 2025 solo debut album, Two Boats Under the Moon, received five stars in BBC Music Magazine and four-star reviews in both Songlines and The Scotsman, bringing him to wider attention as a distinctive voice in Scottish folk and traditional song. Dreaming Pipes presents one central strand of that wider practice in a form that is at once musical, visual and practical, allowing audiences to encounter instrument development not as a finished fact, but as an unfolding creative field.