However, there are several excellent tutors on the market. If you have an instructor, that person will have his or her own recommendation, and may even have their own teaching program. You may also want some kind of beginner tutor book. Wooden chanters can be more rich and vibrant, but if you’re just getting started, plastic is very suitable and you can upgrade to wood at a later date.Ĭlick here to see the McGillivray Piping line of practice chanters African Blackwood has been the wood of choice for bagpipes and chanters for more than 100 years. You may also wish to opt for a higher-end wooden chanter. Some companies (like this one) also offer a child’s chanter for very young children, which is even smaller than the regular. There is less call for them today, though lots of younger children start on the regular-sized chanter. However, for well over a century, practice chanters were shorter than pipe chanters, and these are what we now call ‘regular’ chanters. Practice chanters come in two sizes: ‘regular’ and ‘long.’ The long chanter is so named because the finger holes are the same distance apart as those on the pipe chanter. These can cost between $175 and $400, and a lot more if you want silver or engraving on it. They can also be made out of musical-grade hardwoods. These are tough little instruments that can cost between $75 and $175. Practice chanters can be made out of polypenco (also called delrin), which is basically plastic. Talent is only part of the package: time commitment is crucial. Many people will do more.īy focused practice, we mean not sitting on the couch wiggling your fingers while you watch the football game. In my experience of 45 years of teaching pipes, the students who practice the most are the ones who advance the quickest. Having said that, an hour a day 6 days a week is a wonderful way to make fantastic progress. You should be prepared to practice in a very focused way for a minimum of 25 minutes a day at least 5 days a week. Use every opportunity you can to travel to workshops and summer schools. If you don’t have a good instructor near you, there are instructors in North America and throughout the world who will teach online. Written tutorials help but do not always steer you clear of pitfalls. It’s a highly physical instrument with a very sophisticated system of gracenoting. Good instruction is a must this is not an easy instrument to “pick up” on your own. Like any instrument, it’s preferable if you learn as a child or teen, but lots of adults (we call them ‘mature students’) have made a great hobby of piping, provided they combine patience and perseverance with an intelligent approach and good instruction. Okay: it’s a big step, because it’s a challenging instrument. So you want to learn to play the bagpipes…. If I were teaching myself now, I would tell wee Jimmy to play a smaller bag and have his blowstick shortened by about 4 inches. This is me playing pipes for the first time in my parents’ home in February of 1967.
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