Of course there are a bunch of other notes that fall in the just intonation scheme that aren’t included in the normal bagpipe scale. You can play these as long as there are no C notes in the tune. Lastly, some tunes are written in the key of G major (F# only). Yikes! You can play C major tunes on the bagpipe as long as there are no C or F notes indicated. The problem with this is that no symbols indicates the key of C major (no sharps or flats). Sometimes bagpipe music books leave off the key signature entirely because they presume that no one other than a bagpiper will want to read the music, as if grace notes or our arbitrary selection of A = 480 Hz were really that off putting. You might find some non-bagpipe music written in A major that you can still play on the bagpipes because the tune contains no G notes that would require G# to be played. It is there to remind you that even though the music may look like it’s in A major (C#, F#, and G#) being heavily based around the note A, it’s actually in D major/A mixolydian (C#, F#, and G). That funny looking symbol, ♮, is the symbol for natural. When you look at pipe music you *should* see a D major or A mixolydian key indicated. When you look at sheet music, it tells you what key to play it in right next to the clef symbol. A mixolydian is the same as A major (C#, F#, and G#) but with a flattened 7th note (G instead of G#). ![]() ![]() Most modern chanters are sharper than this convention so it might be better to say the key is A mixolydian (since we tune our drones to “A”) with a really out of tune sharp low A at 480 Hz instead of the standard 440 Hz. To music people you would be better off saying the key of Eb (E-flat) major ONLY if you happen to be playing a Bb/Orchestral chanter where low A is meant to tune to Bb = 466 Hz. This means the bagpipe scale is in the key of D major (because of the C# and F#) but oddly enough our scale starts on A instead of D when we write the music out. The corresponding notes in the bagpipe entire 9 note scale are: I haven’t taken the time to figure out why we don’t just call them A B C D E F G H I J K L A, it is what it is for now. Those # symbols mean “sharp”, b symbols mean “flat”, and no symbol means “natural”. ![]() C#, F#, and G would be way off hence why we need to beauty of the just intonation scale.Īll 12 notes in an equal temperament scale, starting at A, are labeled: If bagpipers used the equal temperament scale the drones would sound out of tune for every note but the As, although B, D, and E might be close enough. You can already see there’s more beauty in the just intonation scale. Instead of this equal temperament scale, bagpipers use the just intonation scale which is achieved by multiplying the fundamental note by fractions made of small numbers, like 5/3=1.66666, instead of the corresponding equal temperament 2^(9/12)=1.6818. To fill out one octave of the equal temperament scale, you would multiply an established fundamental note, say 440 Hz, by 2^(X/12) where X is from 1 to 12. The first thing to know about bagpipe chanter tuning is it is different than the more common equal temperament scale which has note frequencies increasing by multiplying the previous note by 2^(1/12).
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