Can you play an ‘A’ whistle to Highland music? Along with Scottish smallpipes?
I’ll stop bugging you guys shortly…
I’m not sure…can you tell us what key smallpipes use?
Here’s some information on the keys of whistles:
…can you tell us what key smallpipes use?
A…virtually all Scottish music is in ‘A’. At least music for Great Highland pipes and smallpipes.
Like A harmonic Major, with C#, F# and G# ???
How does the scale go ?
[ This Message was edited by: Zubivka on 2002-12-04 17:43 ]
Almost all Highland pipes are tuned in A(sort of; actually it’s Bflat, but not really), and can only play in that key. You can get smallpipes, however, tuned in D, G, Bflat, and who knows what else as well as A. So, to to decide what whistle you need, you have to know what key the smallpipes you’re planning to play with are in.
Presuming these particuliar pipes are ine A, then you may run into a slight problem with the range of the whistle. Pipes are tuned to play the note below the base note of the scale they are tuned in. For example: a set of smallpipes tuned in A will also be able to the B note below the bottom A. An A whistle, however, will not. Therefore, on pipe tunes that go below the A note, you may have to jump an octave; this could cause problems with running out of notes on the high end(I think). You could probably work around this, though, using octave switches.
So to summarize: an A whistle will work great on tunes that don’t go down to the lowest note on the pipe chanter. You may have to mess around a little with tunes that do go that low to get them to work.
Hope I’m correct in all this…
True Believer
Nate
[ This Message was edited by: energy on 2002-12-04 18:23 ]
If the tune is in the key of A major, and goes below the Keynote A. You may be able to play it on a low E whistle.
A D whistle plays easily in the key of G using the (0xx000) cross fingered C natural tone instead of the Csharp (000000).
An E whistle can play in the key A. It uses the cross fingering for the D natural instead of the D Sharp you have in the key of E. It also means you could play the tune an octave above by using a soprano (high) E whistle.
\
Enjoy Your Music,
Lee Marsh
[ This Message was edited by: LeeMarsh on 2002-12-04 20:16 ]
Your standard D whistle is the best one for playing with smallpipes or borderpipes with an A chanter. This is because it has the full range of the pipes and it has the right sharps and naturals (G natural, F sharp, C sharp) for pipe tunes. I have tried playing an A whistle along with pipe tunes but it actually is pretty hard partly because of the missing low G and partly because there’s often lots of high As in pipe tunes and the fingering on an A whistle makes life harder. Also the A whistle tends to get drowned out against the pipes. My advice is to stick with the high D.