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.