Band versus Solo Piping

When pipers are playing together, it is obvious that they should all be playing the same low A (and ditto for all the other notes).  On the other hand, solo pipers can have, within reason, any low A as long as the relative frequencies of the other notes to low A are correct.

But what is, most commonly, the pitch or frequency of low A?  [On this website we will treat the terms as meaning the same thing, even if this is not strictly correct.]  As is well known to most pipers, the bagpipe low A is not the same as Concert Pitch (the frequency, generally accepted as 440 hertz, of the note A above middle C in Western classical music.  A major source of confusion (one of many!) for pipers trying to understand the musical scale of their instrument is that the base note of the scale is called A whereas in Western music, the basic scale (without necessitating sharps or flats) is called C major.  But we will ignore that for  the moment.

Low-A Pitch Inflation

As an aside, it is clear that the pitch of the bagpipe low A has gradually increased over time.  It is apparently somewhere around 480 Hz currently.  I have my original Regal chanter from the mid-1960s which tunes with low A around 462 Hz.  It simply cannot be made to play at a modern pitch of around 480 Hz.

But let's leave to one side the relatively uninteresting question of the basic pitch of low A.  A more interesting and important question relates to the differences between the bagpipe scale and the Western classical scale in relation to the intervals between the notes. 

Bagpipe and Other Scales

The familiar first notes of the Western major scale (doh-re-mi...) consist of two tones and a semi-tone starting from the tonic (ie the base note low-A on the bagpipe) arranged as 

  tone-tone-semitone 

A      B     C            D      

so A to B and B to C are both tones on the bagpipe whereas C to D is a semitone.  But in the Western musical scale B to C is a semitone.  This is why you will sometimes read that the bagpipe C is actually C-sharp, a semitone higher than C.

Beyond D on the bagpipe, things get a bit more complicated.  The Western musical scale and the bagpipe scale are quite different near the top of the scale.  The Western major scale conforms to what is called the Ionian mode, which is the name for the familiar pattern of tones and semitones:

tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone

Whereas the bagpipe scale approximates to a different mode, known as Mixolydian, whose pattern is:

tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-semitone-tone.

If you are familiar with the sound of the Western musical scale (the 8 white notes on a piano, starting from C) the bagpipe scale sounds similar at first but near the top, you can very clearly tell the difference in the form of its flattened G note.  This is the most obvious difference between the two scales (but not the only one as we shall see).

The pitch of the bagpipe G is a topic on which much ink has been spilled.  We will return to that later.  But the other differences between the bagpipe and Western musical scales are where things get really interesting (and even more complicated) but the complications are not on the bagpiping side.  As we will see in the next section it is the compromises that classical music has had to make that make its scales difficult to understand.

I am referring to the issue of temperament, the subject which bedevilled Western music for hundreds of years - in other words how, exactly should the octave of 5 tones and 2 semitones be divided up.

Temperament - Bagpipe Purity versus Classical Compromise

What we are talking about is known as Temperament, namely how we divide up the octave (or in physical terms, set the frequencies of the seven notes A to G.  Or in other words how do we define a tone?  From the above, it is obvious that our major scale has 6 tones (or 12 semitones) in total.  So we can divide the octave using geometric (not arithmetic) intervals based on a semitone having a frequency interval of 1/12th of the octave.  Without venturing into an explanation of what sounds sweet versus discordant, let us just accept that to produce perfect harmonies between notes, their frequencies should have simple geometric relationships to each other (2:1 for notes which are an octave apart, or 4:3, 3:2, 9:8, etc.). Such range of notes is called "Just".  It is possible to achieve this on the pipes because its musical range is limited essentially to one octave.  For a piano or any other instrument that can play several octaves and in different keys, this logical arrangement is simply not possible.  The solution adopted in Western classical music (known as equal temperament, ET in the table below) is to make all the notes out of tune but not by enough that the clashes are excessively (or maybe even noticeably) discordant. 

The Just temperament built into the Blair HBT-3 tuner that I use is shown below.  I determined this myself by using a tone generator.  I had asked Murray Blair for this information but did not get a reply.  But there is no doubt that these are the ratios that are programmed into it.

Intervals of the Bagpipe Scale compared with the nearest Classical Equal Tempered Scale

To summarise, it is the Just Temperament of the bagpipe that, together with well-tuned drones, allows it to sound so magnificent.  But it also means that the bagpipe scale does not and should not sound the same as the Western classical major scale (and not just because of the bagpipe's flattened G).  

On another page, I consider the question of how close to the perfect Just pitches it is possible to tune a chanter.  But the next page looks at two different issues: what I call the high G and high A problems

The G' and A' Problems

So what is the issue of high G?  It's a question of which fractional relationship should hold between high G and low A.  My Blair HBT-3 tuner is programmed to treat a perfect high G as having a ratio of 1.75:1 (ie, 7/4) to low A, which is a very flat high G (much less than a semitone above F.  A different, and much sharper high G was used by the famous piper Seamus McNeill whose ratio was 1.8:1 (9/5).  Another possibility is a ratio of 16/9 or 1.778:1 giving a high G between the afore-mentioned levels (and rather far from the small-number ratios of the other notes).  Each of these Gs is still a Just note but they sound quite different.  They are so wide apart that they cannot be changed by applying tape (eg, to the top of a "MacNeill" chanter G hole to bring it down to the "Blair" pitch).  I believe that chanter manufacturers currently opt to have the 7/4 ratio for high G.

For high A, the problem is different.  For reasons that are not at all clear, all top pipers seem to agree that it should be tuned slightly flatter than a perfect octave above low A.  I have read that this may be to help the high A stand out against the drones or because pipers fear more than anything having a high A that is too sharp.