Until about 1900, the expenses of an instrument (or dish, etc.) were mainly due to the material, not the work

An instrument that takes a month's work to make is going to cost at least a month's wages to buy.

The material is often chosen simply because if you're putting weeks of work into something your customers are going to want it to last. Hence boxwood for most woodwinds and blackwood for others. There is no surviving fragment of any early Highland pipe chanter made out of native timber; they were all made of imported African timbers, back to around 1500. (And probably none was ever made in the Highlands, either).