Paul Hirsh

Hi, I'm Paul Hirsh, jazz musician. My musical career has been about trying to find the ideal instrument for improvisation. One that would follow your inspiration wherever it takes you, even to places you've never been before.

My aim was to be able to play "like singing in the shower". The instrument had to be intuitive to learn, like your own voice, and play chromatically in all keys with equal ease.

And the nearest I came to that ideal has been the wholetone-tuned panpipes.

The semitones are obtained by tilting the instrument. So the 12 notes of the octave are packed into 6 tubes. Because it doesn't give preference to any particular scale, it is not designed for the cheesy easy listening repertoire that you associate with traditional panpipes. Which is why I call it "the thinking man's panpipes".

Over the last 35 years I have used my 3D design skills to make the perfect instrument, as light and fleet as possible, with acoustically optimized internal profile.

It just does what I want it to. Nothing more, nothing less.