Cillian Vallely learnt his music from his parents Brian and Eithne, who founded the Armagh Pipers' Club. Cillian took up his father's instrument - the uilleann pipes - and polished his skills with tutelage from the late Armagh piper Mark Donnelly. His mastery of chanter, drones and regulators and of all the accents and moods of the traditional piping idiom place him in the first rank of today's Irish pipers.

Cillian now tours with the group Lúnasa and has also performed extensively in America with groups such as New York's Whirligig and Paddy O'Brien's Chulrua. He has appeared with fiddler Seamus Connolly, Riverdance on Broadway and Tim O'Brien's The Crossing.