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This page last updated:
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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How to.. play bagpipes
I MAY have a Scottish name, but the furthest north I have ever lived is Hull, and the only time I have really heard bagpipes being played is in the summer in Cathedral Square.
So when I went to visit bagpiper George Kerr (pictured below right) at his Dogsthorpe home, I hoped these two factors wouldn’t stand against me in learning to play the great Highland war pipe – the bagpipes.
Of course, I knew already that there was no way I would ever learn how to play the instrument in one session – although in every non-musician’s mind there is the hope that they are really a natural and will be playing a perfect sonata as soon as they pick the instrument up.
George’s first words soon put a stop to all that dreaming though when he repeated the old Highland belief that it takes seven years to make a piper.
When he learned the bagpipes in 1950 he didn’t even get to pick up a pair of pipes until he had spent two years learning tunes on a practice pipe.
The real problem with learning how to play the traditional instrument is that it is split into several parts.
As well as learning how to play the tunes and the unique fingering of the bagpipe’s chanter, you have to learn how to inflate the bag, keep it inflated using just your own breath, and, if you’re in a band, how to march in time with everyone else as you play.
I didn’t even get as far as playing any note on the bagpipes, as I nearly keeled over trying to blow the bag up.
The bagpipes are quite unwieldy when you first pick them up. The three drones that go on your shoulder are much bigger than you think they ever could be. The bag itself doesn’t really have any handholds as you try to inflate it, so you end up having to hold the chanter – the pipe section where you finger all the notes.
The secret was to fill the bag using the blowpipe so that the pressure was strong enough to close the valve that stops air rushing back down your throat.
You knew when you were close to getting the bag filled as a strangled squeaking noise came out of the drones, before deepening into the traditional Highland swirl of sound.
Sadly the closest I got was the squeaking. My face slowly turned red while I tried to fill the bag with the strongest breaths I could muster.
By the end of my first attempt I could feel an asthma attack coming on, and the room felt like it might start swimming any moment.
George said: “You have got to concentrate on doing it until it becomes natural.
“People take ages to learn to get the bag up, and then when they have, the next problem is keeping it up. Once you’ve learned the technique you wonder where the problem was!”
The 83-year-old added that a good piper also needed a good memory for a tune, as there was nowhere to keep the sheet music when you were performing.
The bagpipes only had one scale, in A, containing nine notes.
The musical notation looked quite different from any other instrument as it contained all the little pips, little fluttered notes almost like a guitarist, that the pipers learn to play over the main melody.
He said: “The bagpipes have taken me all over the world, but you never finish learning to play.”