“You can tune those things?” my son asks with an incredulous expression. It’s his favorite bagpipe joke.
Though many may have seriously wondered, yes, you can (and must) tune bagpipes. Friend and EUSPBA Judge Al McMullin once told me, “It doesn’t matter how well you play, if the pipes are out of tune, no one wants to listen!”
Tuning the bagpipes involves matching three drones to the chanter. This is certainly critical, and it involves less than a hairline difference between “in” and “out” for each drone.
But it also means tuning the chanter notes in relation to one another. Whether what we want can be called a well-tempered chanter I leave to better music scholars. I’ve read what we’re after on modern pipes is just intonation to the Mixolydian scale. Whatever it’s properly called, I remember Duke Ellington’s dictum (slightly out of context): If it sounds good, it IS good.
When the chanter is properly balanced and the drone tuning “locked in,” the pipes will sound rich, “plaintive and sweet.” Whereas a chanter or drones that are out of balance are discordant and lacking the harmonics that make a well-tuned pipe so pleasing. Only when the pipes are in tune can people enjoy the music we make.
Balancing a chanter involves bringing the individual notes into alignment with one another. There are two adjustments that can be made (excluding, for the moment, manipulation of the reed itself, which is another challenging aspect). One is to raise or sink the reed in the throat of the chanter. Sinking the reed into the chanter will raise the overall pitch, though not evenly, while moving it upward/outward will flatten the pitch.
But the change in reed position affects the higher notes (“top hand”) more than the lower notes (played by the bottom hand).
So that’s part of the tuning equation, but it is just the starting point. Once the piper finds the optimal reed position, he or she must often adjust a few individual notes. The highland pipe chanter is a rather primitive instrument – it consists simply of holes bored in a conical pipe.
The adjustment mechanism is also simple. Tape. Look closely at a pipe chanter and you will see tape near and sometimes covering the holes on the chanter. That’s how we tune it.
Adding tape across the upper side of a hole flattens the note. Removing tape sharpens it, up to a point (that is, when there is no tape on the hole at all, it’s as sharp as it will go without altering the hole). That’s how we adjust various notes on the chanter.
If a note is flat with no tape, either sink the reed, or—if it is consistently flat even with different reeds, do a wee bit of carving on the upper side to make the hole larger. [Side note: Bill Caudill once told me that I needed to carve the B on my Naill African blackwood chanter. I cringed, but he was right—he’d heard enough Naills to know. Carving is permanent, so pipers, try everything else before carving, and carve little at a time and carefully.]
Sometimes we get confused, and we flatten when we need to sharpen or sharpen when we need to flatten.
This happened recently a friend of mine who was struggling to set up a new reed. He said, “… E & the As are pretty much easily ‘in the green.’ My C D F G not so much …” The latter group were flat, and he had tried to remedy it by taping them. It was the wrong direction. If your As & E are fine and all else is flat, sink the reed a bit and only tape E and As (you may not have to tape the low A).
Once he was reminded which way was up—bang—he got it sorted out quickly.
That’s sometimes how it goes. We find ourselves bumping around in the dark, our efforts failing; but with a timely word from a friend the light dawns. We realize which way is up and become even tempered and in tune.