So, this is a flat set I assume?
It’s the first time I’ve seen both pipes together
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=fNhWxH_NUh8
I would guess its a A concert chanter on the highland pipes playing with a d chanter, but I didnt check the pitch against anything.
Have you heard Ross Ainsle and Jarlath Henderson?
D chanters cover the a mix scale of the scottish pipes.
I agree with Patrick. Sounds like a concert pitch set of uilleann pipes with an A set of Highland pipes. Border pipes and small pipes are pitched in A and you can play with them no bother and they have the same scale and fingering as GHBs. I’m sure you can find GHBs in A if you look hard enough. They all used to be in A.
Didn’t like that tune. Yech.
huh didn’t know that..
Yup, it’s an A chanter. You’ll notice that the GHB piper has his drones plugged.
I was recently talking to a lovably cantankerous pipemaker who happens to make the odd set of GHBs in A from time to time and mentioned that I’d love to play a set of GHBs in A myself. “They’re all supposed to be in A, anyway,” he replied, “Well, maybe some of these McCallum chanters that you hear nowadays aren’t, but the basic design is supposed to be in A. They just keep making goddamned smaller and shriller reeds…”
There is no doubt that GHBs used to play at a much lower pitch. Like flat sets of uilleann pipes, they were not necessarily made to be bang-on a certain frequency, but many sets from the early part of the 20th century or before seem to have been made to play somewhere in the neighborhood of A = 440-450 or so. These days, most top pipe bands play pipes that are pitched well above A =480.
The situation is somewhat analogous to that of the trumpet, which is pitched in Bb but almost universally played with mouthpieces adapted from a late 19th-century design intended for an A trumpet. (That’s the reason why trumpet players have to lip certain notes up or down in order to play in tune. The trumpet maker David Monette redesigned both mouthpiece and instrument to get rid of this design flaw.) With pipes, moving the pitch up with sharper reeds does not seem to have negatively affected the intonation of the instrument, though in my opinion, some modern chanters have a high A that’s capable of causing seizures…
There is, fortunately, a growing resurgence in GHB pipers playing “flat sets” pitched in A. Hamish Moore, Julian Goodacre, and a handful of other pipemakers have been making A sets for quite some time. Try doing a search for the Scottish band “Seudan.” They play sets in A and sound wonderful. The clips of Jarlath Henderson and Ross Ainslie (on Scottish Border pipes) are fun, too.
By the way, the GHB player in this clip is Richard Parkes, MBE, pipe major of the several times world champion Field Marshal Montgomery pipe band from South Belfast. I’m not all that familiar with Trevor Stewart. Sounds like he was mostly trying to accommodate Mr. Parkes in terms of tune selection and arrangement…
Maybe it should be mentioned that highland pipes used to be round about A440 more by chance than design. Personally I think pipes pitched at Bb have a better tone for solo playing but A’s have a softer sound and are better when playing other instruments. The pipes in the clip are probably an early reintroduction to A as they don’t play that well IMO.
Wrong forum but,
I was looking at this chanter:
yesterday at the Piping Center (I stayed in the hotel there hard to sleep thinking of all those lovely sets of pipes and wishing to creep down and steal them) and the bore was huge not really analogous to flat sets in uilleann world.
I think at the end of that article Julian says two myths about early highland pipes is that they were in A and that they were quieter.
Great article dunnp. The Iain Dall chanter reproduction came out as concert Bb right enough, but with what sounded to me as a warmer tone than modern chanters. It may have been something to do with the recording but I don’t think so. On the other hand, Hamish and Fin Moore made a replica of the Black set of Kintail, made in 1785, and they were concert A so the likelihood is that it’s a mistake to state highland pipes used to be at such and such a pitch. But it’s true to say that there were A pipes as well as Bb.
…I should say the original set were made in 1785 - not the replica set by the Moores 
Some of Ross Ainslie and Jarlath Henderson on Border pipes and Uilleann pipes…
http://youtu.be/6wdI6_Zeoy4
http://youtu.be/V76fnRcHfm8
Great article.
I didn’t mean to suggest that older sets of Highland pipes were all pitched in A, rather that like flat sets of uilleann pipes, there was a good deal of variance in pitch. (For instance, most old flat sets of uilleann pipes were pitched according to how long the chanter was, e.g. 17", 18" ,etc. resulting in instruments that might be pitched in today’s terms at somewhere between C and B, a little flat of B, etc.) It seems reasonable to suggest that sets made between the late 18th century and the early 20th century were probably pitched somewhere near A-ish on the low end to a bit below Bb on the high end. The reed design was, of course, crucial in this, and that’s the real problem because we don’t have any surviving 18th century chanter reeds for reference. The picture of a chanter with its reed in Joseph Macdonald’s 1760 book looks abnormally large, but it may not be the most accurate depiction. I’d be curious to know more about the evolving understanding of the D note, which Barnaby Brown was up until recently asserting was meant to be sharp relative to the rest of the scale (as can sometimes be heard in old recordings). That was the one bit of his research that I wasn’t sure I could get behind–sharp D makes my teeth grate…
You can hear some great old recordings of piping on Ross Anderson’s webpage. For modern Highland pipers taught in the modern style, some of these recordings may be quite surprising. At any rate, the pipes tend to sound audibly lower than modern sets do:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/music/index.html
OK, better get back to regularly scheduled programming before this thread gets moved.