So You Want To Become a Piper?

This page won't tell you how to play pipes. It's intended to give you an idea of what's involved in learning.

To Start With
You'll need two things

An Instructor

A Practice Chanter

The best way to find an instructor is through a band in your area. Bands are always looking for more pipers, amd, if they think you're serious, they'll probably take you on as a student - or refer you to a band that does take beginners. They may or may not charge for lessons. if there is no band in your area, try contacting the pipers' association for your area. They can probably refer you to a teacher (who most assuredly will charge for lessons).

The practice chanter is used to learn the fingering (and afterward for learning new tunes). A reasonable plastic one will cost $50.00 and up, and aside from replacing the reed, will last you almost forever. If you don't know where to get one, your instructor will.

In most cases, your instructor will also want you to by the tutor (instruction book) which he prefers.

What you should not do at this point is buy a set of bagpipes. There are two good reasons for this. First, you are likely to end up with something really awful - either something that was junk to start with, or something that has become junk through neglect. Second, it will be several months, usually close to a year, before you're ready to start on pipes - and quite frankly, the odds are that you'll quit long before that. Something less than one in every five beginners actually get to the stage of playing pipes. Best to wait and let your instructor help you choose a set when he feels you're ready.

On the the other hand, this would be a good time to start saving up for a set. Unless you trip over a real bargain, don't expect to pay much less than $1000.00 for a decent set of pipes. On top of that, even if you join a band, you may have to buy some parts of your uniform. Of course, if you drop out, you can always use the money for something else - which you can't do with a set of pipes.

What If You Can't Read Music?

There's an old joke that goes
"Can you read music?"
"Not enough to hurt my playing."

In the case of bagpipes, it might be "Not enough to hurt my learning." Pipe music is written and interpreted differently than for most other instuments. In any case, learning to read pipe music is an integral part of the learning process.

The Learning Process

The first thing you will learn is the scale. There are nine notes available on the pipes; you just have to learn the proper fingering pattern of open and closed holes for each one, and you've got it. That's the easy part.

Then you will move on to gracenotes. To illustrate the difference;

This is the first line of Scotland the Brave. The large notes, with tails pointing down, are the melody notes. That's the scale you just learned.

The little buggers with their tails pointing up are the gracenotes. They're the ones that cause all the trouble. As you see, they sometimes appear alone, and sometimes in various combinations known as doublings, half-doublings, shakes, slurs, grips, taorluaths, throws,and so on. For the next several months, your time will be spent learning to play all of these combinations very quickly and accurately between any two notes of the scale that they can be made to fit between.

Once you have achieved a reasonable level of proficiency at the gracenote exercises, you move on to learning some simple tunes - with the emphasis on learning. Since you'll be working on pipes without a music stand, you have to not only learn to play the tune, you have to commit the whole thing, melody and gracenotes, to memory so that you can play it just as well as if you had the music in front of you.