It seems I’ve unexpectedly (via trade-in through the store) acquired a set of Scottish Smallpipes in D.
So, how different from UP/whistle/flute is the fingering on these rascals.
Will I be able to play them when they get here or do you have to be smart or something?
Doc
Fingering is different. Ornamentation can be a personal decision, but generally this also is rather different from UP ornamentation. Getting the tutor book/video “More Power To Your Elbow” by the Lowland & Border Pipers Society (www.lbps.net) would be a wise investment.
Have fun!
doc, who made them?
From what I’ve heard from Uilleann Pipers with regards to SSPs, the pressure and managing it will be a lot more finicky than your UPs. Too much, and the pitch rises where they eventually cut out, too low, and they are flat, warble, and eventually cut out. They will use GHB fingering, and most smallpipers use a good portion of GHB embellishments. You probably won’t see many Crunluaths or Taorluaths, but be ready for mainly G D E’s, Doublings, some Grips, and the well known and loved embellishment known only as The Birl. The main reason being that alot of the more ‘crackly’ gracings heard in common GHB piping don’t sound as clean in the sweeter tone of the Smallpipes. Opposite to GHB, your high hand will also sound clearer and louder than your low hand, so watch that your low hand gracings and melody notes don’t get gobbled up in some tunes.
That’s my two cents.
hi
I have a set of SSPs by Ian Ketchin that will play in tune with GHB semi-closed fingering, Northumbrian style closed fingering (where only one finger is lifted off the chanter at any time), or open fingering (like the whistle). Try all three, and see what works best - I find that the closed style is a shade quieter, and the open fingering has a real skirl to it, as well as being a bit louder. GHB fingering is in between. I gues that’s why they say the SSP chanter is ‘forgiving’, and it is - you might have 3 chanters for the price of one, as I have!
and yes, get the LBPS book - it’s excellent.
good luck
brian
They are made by Shepherd. Is that good?
Doc
Shepherd smallpipes kind of crashed onto the scene about 10 years ago. They’re decent in that they are wood pipes but with plastic reeds that are more moisture resilient. They didn’t quite conquer the scene as Walsh and Gibson really cornered the market for that kind of thing and the bellows pipe enthusiasts never really embraced them since they are mouthblown.
They are made to play with standard GHB technique. It’s a bit closer to UP than to flute or whistle. You might be able to fake some tunes on it out of the box. Most cutting is done with the C followed by G and A (in UP/whistle/flute parlance, GDE in Highland parlance). Those and taps will allow to play basic technique. The rest of the ornamentation is rigourously technical and standardized. Here’s a fingering chart in the standard A, ignore the accidentals as they are probably note true on the smallpipe chanter. Use the modern “C”. Also bear in mind the 7th is probably flattened as is typical on Scottish pipes.
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Very cool Aaron. Thanks much.
Incidently, this set is bellows blown or I wouldn’t have bothered.
Doc
Hey, bellows blown, even better!
I was just looking at the fingering chart I posted and there are some differences from the standard. The 7th and 8th (“g” and “a” on the chart or High G and High A in GHB parlance) are usually fingered X OOO XXXO and O OOX XXXO respectively. I know a few GHB pipers who finger the High A as on the chart and makes no difference in tone. The High G as show on the chart is usally just played in piobaireachd, the oft-called “classical” music of the GHB. When fingered as such on a GHB chanter the note sounds different.
Cheers,
Aaron
The College of Piping Tutor (the green booklet) is an excellent starter. You may want to get a practice chanter to noodle on.
Dave
The Shepherd D “smallpipes” are in fact a different animal entirely than the Walsh or Gibson or other practice-chanter-based practice pipes for the GHB set. For one thing they do have plastic reeds but the tone is a bit better and brighter than the buzzy practice chanter sound because it’s basically an NSP-type setup rather than the very narrow reed/bore of the others. And of course they’re in D because the chanter is shortened up to play in D based on a GHB practice-chanter scale span, meaning you’ll be hard pressed to not have to play on fingertips if you have very large hands at all and things like the birl will be a bit dodgy.
PM Rob Matheson was pimping these around when they came out and did a pretty good job on them but had to totally modify his grip and technique to play them. The bellows is a big plus by the way, as mouthblown versions with plastic reeds do work longer than cane reeds but eventually get wet and gurgle depending on the extreme moisture control systems installed in the bag or not, and bag type of course.
As far as UP, well, not even close to them in any way.
I suppose some very new model might have widened the bore and lengthened the scale but you’ll know when they arrive–I’m not aware Sheperd went that route and his D models have not been very popular to tell the truth for the reasons stated.
Of the plastic reeded D sets with a short scale though, they rate highly. Because they’re about the only ones out there…for the reasons stated.
Well the SSPs arrived as has a set of NSPs (with F and D chanters and drone extensions to accomodate the D).
Both are fun. The SSPs are playing easily right out of the box using sort of UPish fingering…very easy to get nice tone and get the drones to cooperate as long as I don’t crank on the bag too much.
The NSPs are nice too. I try not to look at them while I’m playing as the wild complexity of the bazillion keys makes me a bit dizzy. But, ignoring the keys, and just using the holes, I can play a tune. They require a bit more concentration than the SSPs but have a delightful tone.
One benefit to the NSPs is that the drones occassionally whack me upside the head to keep me paying attention to my bag pressure. 
My only question is why don’t the makers of these smallpipes join us in the 21st century where A=440?
Seems like an awful lot of work to learn to play these rascals just to play alone or irritate everybody else by nicely asking them to retune up a bit.
I fear smallpipes makers are dooming their instruments to eventual extinction.
I think they’d do well to follow the lead of the modern flute makers and correct the tuning oddities so these cute little rascals can have a future.
Doc
You can get Northumbrian pipes that have been tuned to Concert F, F#, or G…I don’t play NSP, so I don’t understand the context or the appeal to playing an instrument a bit sharp of F. They do sound quite nice, though.
Personally, I’d like to see more Highland pipemakers bring the pitch back down to A=440…Playing Highland pipes with anything else can be a serious pain…
on a diffrent note a=440 is old, I am new to the forum, but not new to music. being an opera major in college, and a piper I have realized a thing or two American bands tune to a=442, American orchestras tune to a=442, and europe is now around that as well. not to say ghb are closer, because my kron chanter is around a=447, but I think anyone playing with new instruments will have to tune up slightly.
Doc, the appeal of playing NSPs at a little sharp of F is that NSPipers, like uilleann pipers, usually play solo, so the actual pitch does not make much difference. The tone of the traditional pitched instrument is sweeter than the tone of true G sets and peppy-er than the luscious low tone of true D sets, so that has remained the standard. Players of uilleann pipes who prefer B or Bb sets know what I am talking about, surely.
NSP makers make what the customer orders and the customers tend to want sets in the traditional pitch, but a good number of them want G or D sets also. So it is not the makers, but the market that decides.
…And don’t forget that with a lot of the old flat sets, they don’t correspond at all to a particular modern pitch, as chanters were made according to a certain number of inches in length and not necessarily according to a certain number of cents equaling the A note. For instance, Robbie Hannan’s B chanter is actually pitched somewere sharp of B. Many of the very old narrow bore one regulator sets are thought to have played somewhere between modern D and Eb…A number of Taylor sets also apparently were pitched sharp of D as well as many orchestras in late 19th/early 20th Century Britain and the US tuned to A=452. This also explains why some wooden flute players who play old flutes (or in some cases, modern copies that are either really authentic reproductions or the maker didn’t think things through about modifying the pitch) have to yank their tuning slides way out to play at A=440.
The recent resurge of interest in wax cylinder recordings has shown pretty conclusively that Highland pipes played around concert A (i.e., between A=440 and A=452) in the early 20th Century and the surge in pitch has been a fairly recent phenomenon that has really gone out of control in the past few decades as pipe bands have striven for a brighter, louder (in the name of God, why?!?) sound. My Shepherd Mk. II chanter which was made about ten years ago is at it’s best at A=472 when last I actually checked. That sounds awful sharp and shrill to me and as I have no interest in playing in a pipe band, I’d prefer to get something a bit lower pitched at some point…By contrast, a friend’s Dunbar chanter which was made a few years later plays at about A=477 and some chanters I’ve recently heard in recordings of pipe band sound like they might be a bit sharper than that…
The old chanters were not tuned to modern (contemporary) pitch standards, that is certain. I am not convinced however that ‘inches’ were the standard - I believe it’s just a coincidence that 'round about 16.5", a semitone corresponds to one inch (i.e. 16.5"*.059 = 0.97"). This I think explains, for instance, the clustering of Coyne chanter lengths around about 15.5 and 17.5 - pitching them a whole tone apart (‘C#’ and ‘B’ as we now say).
The old instruments were too carefully made, on the whole, to have been pitched arbitrarily - they were surely tuned to something other than an arbitrary drone pitch, even if they were entirely expected to be a solo instrument. That said, there were many disparate pitch standards in the 18th and 19th centuries to choose from. One common pitch standard of the time would have the aforementioned pitches at “D” and “C” of the day, so it’s plausible that a “Coyne C#” was actually tuned to the ‘D’ of its day; since no records referring to the pitch of union pipes from that time seem to have survived, we just don’t know how the Coynes or Kennas would have referred to these instruments.
For instance, Robbie Hannan’s B chanter is actually pitched somewere sharp of B.
I think you meant to say somewhat flat of B, as most of the old B sets seem to be; similarly the Coyne C#s that I’ve come across seem to like being similarly flat of C#. I don’t think this is a coincidence. (FWIW the flatness corresponds to about -20 cents flat of the respective modern pitches).
Many of the very old narrow bore one regulator sets are thought to have played somewhere between modern D and Eb…A number of Taylor sets also apparently were pitched sharp of D as well as many orchestras in late 19th/early 20th Century Britain and the US tuned to A=452. This also explains why some wooden flute players who play old flutes (or in some cases, modern copies that are either > really > authentic reproductions or the maker didn’t think things through about modifying the pitch) have to yank their tuning slides way out to play at A=440.
Quite so. In even earlier times, when there were so many competing pitch standards, it was common for one-key flutes to have several interchangeable mid-joints of different lengths (“corps de rechanges”) to help with the problem; this isn’t so practical for keyed flutes of course, and it was bound to have been expensive.
I can’t comment on Highland pipe pitch standards, but will note that pitching edison cylinder recordings can be very difficult since there is often uncertainty about the exact speed at which they were mastered. Sometimes however both playing and the spoken introductions can sound much more ‘natural’ if the speed is adjusted slightly, probably giving a strong hint to the proper speed.