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A bagpipe practice chanter is a double-reed woodwind instrument, principally used as an adjunct to the Great Highland bagpipe. As its name implies, the practice chanter serves as a practice instrument: firstly for learning to finger the different melody notes of bagpipe music, and (after a player masters the bagpipes) to practice new music.
The practice chanter is essentially a long, thin piece of wood or plastic (in two parts) with a small-diameter hole bored lengthwise through the centre. Air is directed into and through this borehole and passes through a reed, the vibration of which causes the sound. On the lower portion of the chanter, holes are bored into the instrument at right angles to the central borehole. These holes are then covered or uncovered to produce the melody.
Practice chanters can be made out of various materials and come in various sizes: short chanters are designed for the smaller hands of a child; regular chanters (as shown in the photo at right) are the same size as the traditional chanters; long chanters are also available, with the added length allowing a melody hole spacing identical to that of the bagpipe chanter itself. On some long chanters, the melody holes are also countersunk so that the outside face of the melody holes will have the same diameter as the bagpipe chanter holes.
Pipe Chanters and practice chanters are typically made out of hardwood such as African Blackwood; before the expansion of the British Empire, native woods were used, and are still used in many folk instruments. In the 1960s African Blackwood was in very short supply, and Ireland's only bagpipe maker,[ citation needed ] Andrew Warnock of The Pipers Cave in Northern Ireland, began making chanters from polyoxymethylene (also known by several names), an extremely strong and durable machinable plastic which at the time was used for making police batons. The Gibson and Dunbar chanters are made out of polyoxymethylene. It is a material that can be machined and polished much like soft metals. Since there is no danger of splitting with a plastic chanter, there is no need for a sole (see below), although some models retain it for decorative purposes.
The practice chanter can be played either sitting or standing.
The practice chanter consists of a top section with mouthpiece, a lower portion with finger holes, and a reed.
The top section consists of the mouthpiece (the uppermost portion) and the reed cover (the thicker portion). The player blows into the mouthpiece. It can be made of nylon, wood, or plastic. The reed cover channels the air over the reed causing it to vibrate and produce the sound. The ring at the base of the reed cover is a ferrule, and is purely decorative. It can be made out of ivory, imitation ivory, plastic, nylon, or a metal such as silver.
The reed can be made of cane or plastic. The two blades of the double reed vibrate against one another when air passes over them, and the sound is channeled down into and through the bottom section of the chanter.
The bottom section of the chanter is the portion that produces the melody which results from the covering and uncovering of small holes drilled into the core of the chanter at precisely determined intervals. The top of this section is the stock into which the reed is inserted. The stock is tightly fitted into the top section of the practice chanter, and is usually wrapped with hemp, plumber tape, etc. to ensure an airtight seal. The base of the bottom section may contain another ring called the sole. On a wooden chanter the sole keeps the wood from splitting. With the advent of plastic chanters, "sole-less" designers are more common.
The practice chanter is, as the name implies, used to practice playing the bagpipes in place of the full instrument. The practice chanter is significantly quieter and better suited for the indoors, and requires less blowing than the bagpipes, making it physically easier to play. [1]
In Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland, musicians traditionally constructed their own practice chanters out of reed (Scottish Gaelic: cuilc) and barley (Scottish Gaelic: eòrna) stalks. The reed was hollowed out with a wire heated over a peat fire, and holes were burned in the reed in the same way, to form the body of the chanter. A short piece of barley stalk was then shaped in the mouth to function as a sounding reed. These home-made chanters were called feadanan Gàidhealach (Highland or Gaelic chanters; singular, feadan Gàidhealach) [2] and were distinguished from manufactured practice chanters as feadanan Gallda (foreign chanters). The sound of the feadan Gàidhealach is quite sweet and it appears that these homemade chanters were not just used for practice, but considered a proper instrument in their own right and played in a traditional house cèilidhs in the Western Isles of Scotland. [3]
Bagpipes are a woodwind instrument using enclosed reeds fed from a constant reservoir of air in the form of a bag. The Great Highland bagpipes are well known, but people have played bagpipes for centuries throughout large parts of Europe, Northern Africa, Western Asia, around the Persian Gulf and northern parts of South Asia.
The uilleann pipes, also known as Union pipes and sometimes called Irish pipes, are the characteristic national bagpipe of Ireland. Their current name is a partial translation of the Irish language terms píobaí uilleann, from their method of inflation. There is no historical record of the name or use of the term uilleann pipes before the 20th century. It was an invention of Grattan Flood and the name stuck. People mistook the term 'union' to refer to the 1800 Act of Union; however, this is incorrect as Breandán Breathnach points out that a poem published in 1796 uses the term 'union'.
The chanter is the part of the bagpipe upon which the player creates the melody. It consists of a number of finger-holes, and in its simpler forms looks similar to a recorder. On more elaborate bagpipes, such as the Northumbrian bagpipes or the Uilleann pipes, it also may have a number of keys, to increase the instrument's range and/or the number of keys it can play in. Like the rest of the bagpipe, they are often decorated with a variety of substances, including metal (silver/nickel/gold/brass), bone, ivory, or plastic mountings.
The great Highland bagpipe is a type of bagpipe native to Scotland, and the Scottish analogue to the great Irish warpipes. It has acquired widespread recognition through its usage in the British military and in pipe bands throughout the world.
The Scottish smallpipe is a bellows-blown bagpipe re-developed by Colin Ross and many others, adapted from an earlier design of the instrument. There are surviving bellows-blown examples of similar historical instruments as well as the mouth-blown Montgomery smallpipes, dated 1757, which are held in the National Museum of Scotland. Some instruments are being built as direct copies of historical examples, but few modern instruments are directly modelled on older examples; the modern instrument is typically larger and lower-pitched. The innovations leading to the modern instrument, in particular the design of the reeds, were largely taken from the Northumbrian smallpipes.
The border pipes are a type of bagpipe related to the Scottish Great Highland Bagpipe. It is perhaps confusable with the Scottish smallpipe, although it is a quite different and much older instrument. Although most modern Border pipes are closely modelled on similar historic instruments, the modern Scottish smallpipes are a modern reinvention, inspired by historic instruments but largely based on Northumbrian smallpipes in their construction.
The Northumbrian smallpipes are bellows-blown bagpipes from Northeastern England, where they have been an important factor in the local musical culture for more than 250 years. The family of the Duke of Northumberland have had an official piper for over 250 years. The Northumbrian Pipers' Society was founded in 1928, to encourage the playing of the instrument and its music; Although there were so few players at times during the last century that some feared the tradition would die out, there are many players and makers of the instrument nowadays, and the Society has played a large role in this revival. In more recent times the Mayor of Gateshead and the Lord Mayor of Newcastle have both established a tradition of appointing official Northumbrian pipers.
Zampogna is a generic term for a number of Italian double chantered bagpipes that can be found as far north as the southern part of the Marche, throughout areas in Abruzzo, Latium, Molise, Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, Apulia and Sicily. The tradition is now mostly associated with Christmas, and the most famous Italian carol, "Tu scendi dalle stelle" is derived from traditional zampogna music. However, there is an ongoing resurgence of the instrument in secular use seen with the increasing number of folk music festivals and folk music ensembles.
Northwest Iberian folk music is a traditional highly distinctive folk style, located along Spain's north-west Atlantic coast, mostly Galicia and Asturias, that has some similarities with the neighbouring area of Cantabria. The music is characterized by the use of bagpipes.
The Hungarian duda is the traditional bagpipe of Hungary. It is an example of a group of bagpipes called Medio-Carparthian bagpipes.
A single-reed instrument is a woodwind instrument that uses only one reed to produce sound. The very earliest single-reed instruments were documented in ancient Egypt, as well as the Middle East, Greece, and the Roman Empire. The earliest types of single-reed instruments used idioglottal reeds, where the vibrating reed is a tongue cut and shaped on the tube of cane. Much later, single-reed instruments started using heteroglottal reeds, where a reed is cut and separated from the tube of cane and attached to a mouthpiece of some sort. By contrast, in a double reed instrument, there is no mouthpiece; the two parts of the reed vibrate against one another. Reeds are traditionally made of cane and produce sound when air is blown across or through them. The type of instruments that use a single reed are clarinets and saxophone. The timbre of a single and double reed instrument is related to the harmonic series caused by the shape of the corpus. E.g. the clarinet is only including the odd harmonics due to air column modes canceling out the even harmonics. This may be compared to the timbre of a square wave.
Welsh bagpipes The names in Welsh refer specifically to a bagpipe. A related instrument is one type of bagpipe chanter, which when played without the bag and drone is called a pibgorn (English:hornpipe). The generic term pibau (pipes) which covers all woodwind instruments is also used. They have been played, documented, represented and described in Wales since the fourteenth century. A piper in Welsh is called a pibydd or a pibgodwr.
This article defines a number of terms that are exclusive, or whose meaning is exclusive, to piping and pipers.
The electronic bagpipes is an electronic musical instrument emulating the tone and/or playing style of the bagpipes. Most electronic bagpipe emulators feature a simulated chanter, which is used to play the melody. Some models also produce a harmonizing drone(s). Some variants employ a simulated bag, wherein the player's pressure on the bag activates a switch maintaining a constant tone. As with other electronic musical instruments, they must be plugged into an instrument amplifier and loudspeaker to hear the sound. Some electronic bagpipes are MIDI controllers that can be plugged into a synth module to create synthesized or sampled bagpipe sounds.
The hornpipe can refer to a specific instrument or a class of woodwind instruments consisting of a single reed, a large diameter melody pipe with finger holes and a bell traditionally made from animal horn. Additionally, a reed cap of animal horn may be placed around the reed to contain the breath and allow circular breathing for constant play, although in many cases the reed is placed directly in the mouth. It was also known as the pibcorn, pibgorn, or piccorn. One rare Scottish example, called the stock-and-horn, is referred to by Robert Burns among others. Other hornpipes include the Spanish gaita gastoreña, the Basque alboka and the Eastern European zhaleika. When joined with a bag, Baines refers to the instruments as "bag-hornpipes".
The redpipe is a brand of electronic bagpipes, an electronic musical instrument made to emulate the sound and characteristics of the bagpipe. In contrast with many other electronic bagpipes which are based solely on a bagpipe chanter, redpipes feature a pressure-sensitive bag in emulation of a bagpipe's bag.
Irish warpipes are an Irish analogue of the Scottish great Highland bagpipe. "Warpipes" is originally an English term. The first use of the Gaelic term in Ireland was recorded in a poem by Seán Ó Neachtain, in which the bagpipes are referred to as píb mhór.
The term „Marktsackpfeife“ commonly refers to a type of bagpipe which has been developed in East Germany at the beginning of 1980s for the specific purpose to be played at faires and markets as a modern interpretation of a certain type of Medieval bapipes. Depictions of such bagpipes are found in Medieval sources and are characterized by specific features like wide flaring bells atop the chanter and drones, apparent conical shape of the chanter and reportedly substantial volume of their sound. Since no actual chanters of this type of bagpipe have survived and/or have been recovered so far, the MSP has to be classified as a purely modern musical instrument having a historically informed exterior. MSP chanters typically use double reeds made of plastic or Arundo donax cane and drones usually work with single reeds made of same materials. Chanter bores are conical with a pronounced flare at the end as they transition into the bell.
McCallum Bagpipes Limited is a company that manufactures Great Highland bagpipes. Founded in 1998, it is based in Kilmarnock, Scotland. The company has worked with bagpiper Willie McCallum to design several products.
