Bagpipe Diagnostic Sounds Page

This page is now in operation.

Latest update 9 September 1996
Copyright 1995 David C. Daye

Feel free to copy sound samples for desktop use and/or your individual study of piping. You may not republish all or portions of this collection in any form, or distribute it in any form, without permission. You may establish electronic pointers or links to this page.

Contents

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Administrivia

For info, problem reports, etc. email CLICK HERE

This page is under construction. It will contain text descriptions of common sound problems, actual sound samples, and diagrams of common remedies. Feel free to offer suggestions and requests. This includes contradictions to anything you feel is misleading or blatantly incorrect (ouch!). Click here to email me if your software permits: CLICK HERE

There are already samples of both GHB (Scottish or Great Highland Bagpipe) and UP (Irish uilleann pipe). More to come.

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Highland Bagpipe Sounds

Click on "text" where present for discussion.
Basic Reed, Practice Chanter & Bagpipe Sounds

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Tuning Process
How to Blow a Reed (Please read text!)
Fingering Errors Obvious & Subtle
Ancient History

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Irish Uilleann Pipe Sounds

Basic Reed Sounds
Chanter Sounds

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Tuning Process

This is just method of tuning. Although the results should be the same, others may prefer to use different steps.

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Some Possible Coming Attractions

Are you considering becoming an uilleann pipe teacher or Highland bagpipe band Pipe-Major? Study these files to learn of the wonderful sounds which soon will occupy all your waking and dreaming thoughts!

These files do not yet exist; sizes are incorrect too.
More GHB Reed & Pipe Diagnostics
Blowing same reed different ways

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Reeds not matching drones

Appendix

About the Samples

This collection consists of sound samples for beginning and intermediate players of GHB and UP.

All the samples are very short (2 to 5 seconds mostly) because of the limitations of transferring over the internet. See the section about Recording Quality for more information about their sound quality and other technical matters.

These are examples of reed and instrument sounds which I believe are rather poorly represented in tutors at this time. Examples do or will include incorrectly blown practice chanter, tuning of drones (correctly and incorrectly), sound of reeds crowing (good and bad crows), sinking uilleann pipe back D, etc. These could be very useful to learners, especially those who are isolated from other and better players.

I have no plans to offer a comprehensive how-to tutor through samples of correctly played technique and embellishments since these are well represented in existing tutors. My purpose is to offer some hard to find examples and counter-examples for learners (especially isolated learners) and give some ideas to our better teachers for future printed or audio-visual piping tutors.

I am also planning to avoid advanced topics, such as tone comparisons of instruments and sound analysis, because I do not have equipment (both electronic and musical) sufficient for these purposes.

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About the Recording Quality

These sounds were recorded with a low-end ( $200 US) professional dynamic microphone onto a high-speed cassette recorder to ensure fairly good tonal quality. They were then digitized with the minimum of sound quality (and thus the smallest computer file size) that would allow the sounds to be intelligible and useful. Considerably higher sound quality can be provided, but at the cost of doubling or tripling the current file sizes and therefore their transfer time over the 'Net.

All files are in Microsoft Windows "Wave" format. Many such as reed crow sounds are 8-bit sound sampled at 11 KHz. Those requiring more high frequency clarity, such as drone tuning, were sampled at 22 KHz.

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