About | donaldlindsay

"...a 21st century visionary" piper & composer Matthew Welch

"...Donald has earned our admiration and respect for what he is achieving for piping" piper, museum curator, author and professor Hugh Cheape

Donald WG Lindsay is a Scottish musician, traditional singer, songwriter, and instrument inventor whose work reimagines the structural possibilities of bellows piping while remaining grounded in its living tradition.

He is best known for creating the Lindsay System for Scottish smallpipes — a redesign that extends the instrument’s core range to two full octaves while preserving traditional fingering and the idiomatic voice of the pipes. With appropriate voicing and reedwork, the system can stretch to nearly three octaves, without requiring keywork. Donald also plays whistle and low whistle, both now in forms of his own Qwistle design.

The Lindsay System gained early institutional recognition: two prototype chanters, The Rainbow Set of Pollok and A Phìob Ghrianach, were added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Piping at The National Piping Centre in 2019. From 2017 to 2019, its development was documented in a five-part Piping Today series by historian Dr Elizabeth Ford, culminating in the publication of open workshop plans for independent makers, formally drafted from Donald's research by Zexuan Qiao.

In these early years, Donald supported a number of younger makers and players experimenting with the system — including Malin Lewis, who built the first wooden Lindsay System chanter during that period. He also founded the Glasgow Smallpipers, a community-based performance group and club for bellows pipers and their friends, in the city.

As the System reached maturity, Donald returned to performance. Highlights included appearances on STV’s The Riverside Show and Live@5, concerts with Alasdair Roberts, and the development of the collaborative show Standard Habbie for Piping Live! 2018.

In 2019, he handed over his teaching role at the National Piping Centre and left Scotland with his family to live on Ascension Island. There, he focused on further research, design evolution, and foundational writing for a future phase of work.

That future phase has now begun.

Now based in the Orkney Islands, Donald has returned to recording, writing, and teaching. His solo album Two Boats Under the Moon (2025) — composed primarily during his time on Ascension — has been praised by Songlines Magazine and broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland and Celtic Music Radio. His method book for the system, Ascension Method, is in development for release in 2026.

Donald’s ongoing collaboration with designer and academic researcher Zexuan Qiao led to the creation of LSC_PRINT&PLAY, an open-source home-3D-printable variant of the Lindsay System featuring Qiao’s square-bore design — hosted on Thingiverse.com, free-to-download, and intended to remove barriers to access and participation.

He was a member of the St Francis Pipe Band (2013–2018), served as convenor of the Lowland & Border Pipers’ Society (2017–2019). He remains committed to designing open, human-scale tools for music-making, and to supporting musical life as something luminous, structural, and shareable.