Hear various Highland bagpipe chanter tunings

Here are some WAV files (11 kHz, 8 bits, 130KB each) demonstrating the effect of different chanter tunings on the sound of the drone/chanter combination. The sound files were re-synthesized from anechoic recordings of my not-too-carefully-set-up pipes (last-legs MacLellan reed in Naill chanter, plastic Shepherd reeds in Naill drones). The synthesis isn't hi-fi, but the frequency ratios are quite precise.

The three tunings are:

• Equal temperament. This is the standard tuning commonly used for guitars, keyboards, orchestral instruments etc. It provides uniformity of intervals in different keys at the expense of "pure" tuning of the intervals.
• MacNeill. This is the tuning derived by Seumas MacNeill from his measurements of 18 pipers in the early 1950's. The most notable features are the sharp D (27/20) and high G (9/5).
• Harmonic. This tuning uses the harmonic minor seventh (7/4) for high and low G, and the simpler, flatter, Just Intonation fourth for D (4/3). This tuning seems to match the majority of my measurements from the Piping Center 1996 Recital Series CDs, although the "harmonic" high G is the most consistent and pronounced departure from the MacNeill scheme.

Each sound file consists of the following tuning phrase played in the tuning indicated.

Click on the tuning name in the table to hear it.

	Equal Temperament	MacNeill		Harmonic
Note name	cents above Low A	ratio above Low A	deviation from ET (cents)	ratio above Low A	deviation from ET (cents)
High A	1200	2:1	0.0	2:1	0.0
High G	1000	9:5	+17.6	7:4	-31.2
F(#)	900	5:3	-15.6	5:3	-15.6
E	700	3:2	+2.0	3:2	+2.0
D	500	27:20	+19.6	4:3	-2.0
C(#)	400	5:4	-13.7	5:4	-13.7
B	200	9:8	+3.9	9:8	+3.9
Low A	0	1:1	0.0	1:1	0.0
Low G	-200	8:9	-3.9	7:8	-31.2

To my ears, C and F seem particularly wretched in ET, high and low G seem smoothest in Harmonic. Other differences might be more noticable if a wider bandwidth were used.

Dave Keenan, a fellow member of the The Alternate Tuning Internet Mailing List, was interested to know if pipers had ever tried a purely harmonic tuning scheme, in which each chanter note corresponds to a harmonic of a hypothetical "contrabass" drone, three octaves below low A.  The scale which I have called Harmonic above has this property if the D is sharpened to 11/8, and the F(#) flattened to 13/8.  These ratios sound good with the drones, but the scale is clearly not the one we pipers use.

• Tuning phrase in the "ultraharmonic" tuning.
• Compare 4/3 and 11/8 Ds.
• Compare 5/3 and 13/8 Fs.

Other pages of potential interest:

• Article on the Pitch and Scale of the Highland Bagpipe
• Measurements of tuning from the Piping Centre 1996 recital CDs
• Short rant on the tuning of B and low G
• List of my other piping pages
• My WWW Bagpipe Index

Ewan Macpherson, Nov 1998