Bagpipes!

For folks who maybe kind of know what the bagpipes sound like, but don't really know how they work, can you give sort of a primer, just sort of like a quick lesson on...

It's a

large, unwieldy-looking instrument.

It's called the Octopus.

So you've got the things sticking out on your shoulder, those are called the drones.

And two of them are pitched tenor, and one's a bass, so an octave lower.

And then the chanter, which is where you actually do the fingering, that's just eight holes, so nine notes.

So you're blowing into the bag, that's the reservoir, and it's got a one-way valve so that whenever you need to take a breath, you're squeezing with your arm and controlling the pressure.

So the trick of getting a good sounding set of pipes is steady arm control.

You're actually not controlling it with your breath.

You're controlling it with your arm.

So those with a steady arm get a beautiful steady sound.

If you squeeze too hard or blow too hard, it goes sharp.

Not enough goes flat, so you find the middle ground.

And yeah, that's pretty much what there is to it.

There's many different kinds of bags.

I happen to play a goatskin bag.

It gives a lot of stability and resonance to the instrument.

If you don't like maintaining an animal bag, then there's plenty of synthetics out there and stuff like that.

But aside from changes like that, the instrument has been largely the same for hundreds of years, right?

Absolutely, yeah.

This is the great Highland bagpipe, Scottish Highland bagpipe, so a big outdoor instrument.

And yeah, that's certainly had its, you know, there's examples of instruments going back into the 1300s and stuff like that.

And some of that, you know, classical music was around at that time.

For folks who maybe kind of know what the bagpipes sound like, but don't really know how they work, can you give sort of a primer, just sort of like a quick lesson on...

It's a

large, unwieldy-looking instrument.

It's called the Octopus.

So you've got the things sticking out on your shoulder, those are called the drones.

And two of them are pitched tenor, and one's a bass, so an octave lower.

And then the chanter, which is where you actually do the fingering, that's just eight holes, so nine notes.

So you're blowing into the bag, that's the reservoir, and it's got a one-way valve so that whenever you need to take a breath, you're squeezing with your arm and controlling the pressure.

So the trick of getting a good sounding set of pipes is steady arm control.

You're actually not controlling it with your breath.

You're controlling it with your arm.

So those with a steady arm get a beautiful steady sound.

If you squeeze too hard or blow too hard, it goes sharp.

Not enough goes flat, so you find the middle ground.

And yeah, that's pretty much what there is to it.

There's many different kinds of bags.

I happen to play a goatskin bag.

It gives a lot of stability and resonance to the instrument.

If you don't like maintaining an animal bag, then there's plenty of synthetics out there and stuff like that.

But aside from changes like that, the instrument has been largely the same for hundreds of years, right?

Absolutely, yeah.

This is the great Highland bagpipe, Scottish Highland bagpipe, so a big outdoor instrument.

And yeah, that's certainly had its, you know, there's examples of instruments going back into the 1300s and stuff like that.

And some of that, you know, classical music was around at that time.