Design
The Great Highland Bagpipe is classified as a woodwind instrument, like the bassoon, oboe, or clarinet. Although it is further classified as a double-reed instrument, the reeds are all closed inside the wooden stocks, instead of being played directly by mouth as other woodwinds are. The GHB actually has four reeds: the chanter reed (double), two tenor drone reeds (single), and one bass drone reed (single).
A modern set has a bag, a chanter, a blowpipe, two tenor drones, and one bass drone.
The scale of the chanter is in Mixolydian mode, which has a flattened 7th scale degree. It has a range from one whole tone lower than the tonic to one octave above it. Bagpipers call the nine resulting notes low G, low A, B, C, D, E, F, high G, and high A.
The key is close to B-flat major; however, Bagpipe music is written in the key of D major, where the C and F are sharp (the key-signature is usually omitted from scores). This means that a bagpipe note is more than a semitone sharper than the similarly named note in common music. For example, the bagpipe low A is normally tuned to around 470 Hz, which is sharper than the standard B♭ at 466.16 Hz.
Traditionally, certain notes were sometimes tuned slightly off from just intonation. For example, on some old chanters the D and high G would be somewhat sharp. According to Forsyth (1935), the C and F holes were traditionally bored exactly midway between those for B and D and those for E and G, respectively, resulting in approximately a quarter-tone difference from just intonation, somewhat like a "blue" note in jazz. Today, however, the notes of the chanter are usually tuned in just intonation to the Mixolydian scale. The two tenor drones are generally an octave below the keynote of the chanter (low A), and the bass drone two octaves below, but they may be retuned to suit the mode of the melody. Forsyth lists three traditional drone tunings: Ellis, A3/A3/A2; Glen, A4/A4/A2; and Mackay, G3/B3/C2.
Modern developments have included reliable synthetic drone reeds as well as synthetic bags that deal with moisture arguably better than hide bags.
Read more about this topic: Highland Bagpipes
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