Every bagpipe ever built is the same four things: a bag, a melody pipe called the chanter, one or more drones that hold a single note, and something to fill the bag with air. The Bagpipe Society, which has been documenting the instrument since 1986, counts over a hundred distinct types still played.
What separates them is not nationality. It is four mechanical decisions, and those decisions are what determine whether the instrument is loud or quiet, whether it plays nine notes or two octaves, and whether you can practice it in a flat.
McCallum Extended Practice Chanter
Nobody’s first bagpipe is a bagpipe. Highland pipers spend six months to a year on a practice chanter first, and the fingering it teaches carries straight over to Scottish smallpipes and Border pipes as well. Made in Scotland from polypenco, which does not split or swell, and supplied with a tested reed — which on this instrument is most of what you are paying for.
The four things that separate one bagpipe from another
Mouth or bellows
The older design blows into the bag through a blowpipe. The newer one straps a bellows under the right arm and pumps. This is the single most consequential difference on the list, and it is not mainly about effort.
Breath is wet. A mouth-blown reed lives in a permanently damp instrument, so it has to be cut thick enough to survive that, and a thick reed needs pressure to sound. A bellows sends dry air, which lets the maker pare the cane much thinner — Na Píobairí Uilleann, the Irish pipers’ association, describe the result as a mellower and considerably wider response. Dry air is why the bellows-blown pipes can be soft, expressive and played indoors, and why the mouth-blown Highland pipe cannot.
Open chanter or closed
A Highland chanter is open at the bottom and never stops sounding. You cannot play a rest, so every articulation has to be made with grace notes flicked between the melody notes — the entire ornamentation system exists because silence is unavailable.
A Northumbrian chanter is sealed at the bottom and played with only one hole uncovered at a time, so it stops dead between notes and the music is completely staccato. The uilleann chanter is the clever one: it is open, but the player rests its end on the thigh, so it can be either. That is the whole reason the Irish pipes can do things no other bagpipe can.
Conical bore or cylindrical
A chanter bored as a cone gets louder and brighter as it widens, which is where the Highland pipe’s carrying edge comes from. A cylindrical bore of even width sounds softer and rounder. Scottish smallpipes are cylindrical and Border pipes are conical, which is why two instruments that finger identically and are both pitched in A do not sound remotely alike.
How many notes
Most bagpipes have nine notes or fewer, one octave and a bit, with no accidentals and no way to change key. The uilleann pipes have two full octaves and are chromatic. The French musette de cour was fully chromatic over an octave and a half. Northumbrian pipes get their extra notes from keys on the chanter rather than from holes.
The five with living traditions you can join
These are the bagpipes with teachers, tutor books, competitions and makers taking orders. Everything else on earth is played by fewer people than live on one street.
| Air | Chanter | Notes | Volume | Fingering | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Great Highland | Mouth | Open, conical | 9 | Outdoors only | Highland |
| Scottish smallpipes | Usually bellows | Open, cylindrical | 9 | Quiet, indoor | Highland |
| Border pipes | Bellows | Open, conical | 9 | Loud but sociable | Highland |
| Northumbrian smallpipes | Bellows | Closed, keyed | Keys extend it | Very quiet | Closed, its own |
| Uilleann | Bellows | Open or closed at will | Two octaves | Moderate | Its own |
Great Highland bagpipe
Three drones over the left shoulder, a blowpipe, an open conical chanter, and nine notes running from low G to high A in a mixolydian scale with a flattened seventh. It is the instrument everyone pictures, and it spread through the world in the nineteenth century on the back of the British Army rather than by anyone choosing it.
It does not play in tune with anything else, and the gap is widening. The pipe’s low A has always sat above concert pitch, but a chanter recorded in 1885 measured 441 Hz, by the middle of the twentieth century the figure was around 460, and modern chanters tune between 476 and 486 Hz — drifting past concert B flat and still climbing. The practical consequence is that a Highland pipe plays with other Highland pipes and with drums, and with almost nothing else.
It is also a high-pressure instrument requiring a genuinely stiff blow, which is worth knowing before you assume that nine notes makes it the easy one.
Scottish smallpipes
A modern instrument, built in the 1980s from eighteenth-century examples surviving in museums. Cylindrical bore, drones in a single stock lying across the chest, and the same nine-note scale and the same fingering as the Highland pipe at a fraction of the volume.
They come in A or D, the keys fiddlers and guitarists actually use, which is the point of them — this is a bagpipe you can take to a session. Most are bellows-blown, though not all: McCallum’s are mouth-blown, and they build a four-drone combination set that covers both keys. Some makers add a second thumb hole so the chanter can play in a minor mode as well.
Border pipes, also called Lowland pipes
Played across the Scottish Lowlands and the north of England from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, gone for most of the twentieth, and now back. Bellows-blown, pitched in A, three drones in a common stock across the chest, nine notes, Highland fingering.
The conical bore keeps the Highland pipe’s skirl while the bellows and the smaller reed bring the volume down far enough to play alongside other acoustic instruments. Its repertoire has a documented source most traditions would envy: the William Dixon manuscript of 1733, the earliest surviving collection of bagpipe tunes in Britain.
Border pipes and Scottish smallpipes are not two sizes of one instrument. They share a key, a scale and a fingering system, and the bore does the rest: the smallpipe’s cylinder is lilting and soft, the Border pipe’s cone still carries across a field.
Northumbrian smallpipes
The odd one out among British bagpipes, and the only one whose chanter is closed at the far end. It probably descends from the French musette de cour rather than from anything Scottish. Bellows-blown, up to four drones across the chest, and a row of keys along the chanter that add notes above and below the natural scale and supply the accidentals.
Because only one hole is uncovered at a time, the instrument stops between notes, and the sound is crisp and detached in a way no other bagpipe manages. It is quiet enough to play in a room with someone reading in it.
Uilleann pipes
Pronounced ill-un. The Irish pipes emerged in the first half of the eighteenth century and reached their modern form over the following fifty or sixty years, developing out of the pastoral or union pipes played across Britain at the time.
The chanter has a conical bore, ten note holes with the top one under the thumb, and a double reed — the nearest orchestral instrument to it in design and sound is the oboe. It plays two full octaves, and a third has been demonstrated. The player sits, rests the open end of the chanter on the right thigh, and lifts it or presses it down to switch between the sustained style of an open chanter and the staccato of a closed one.
Then there are the regulators. A full set has three of them lying across the lap: keyed pipes, silent until the player’s right wrist presses a key, at which point they sound chords under the melody. One player, playing accompaniment to themselves. Nothing else in the bagpipe family does this, and it is the reason the uilleann pipes take as long as they do.
The other hundred
Bagpipes are not a Celtic instrument that spread. They are a European and West Asian instrument that the Scots happened to export. The Bagpipe Society’s country index runs from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
The Bulgarian gaida keeps the most striking construction of any of them. The bag is an entire goat, peeled off in one piece rather than cut, with the chanter tied into the neck, the blowpipe and drone into the two forelegs, and the rear end tied off. The hide is never tanned — it is turned fur-inwards so the wool absorbs the moisture, and dressed occasionally on the outside with lanolin.
The Swedish säckpipa is mouth-blown with a single free-standing drone at A and single reeds throughout. Its chanter has six finger holes and a thumb hole giving an A minor scale, and each hole sits in a deep scooped depression, so a finger that lands anywhere near the hole falls into it. In tone it is closer to a harmonica than to anything Scottish.
The musette de cour was the aristocrat’s bagpipe, refined in France from the end of the sixteenth century, largely by the Hotteterre family, who added a second chanter to extend its range. Its drone is a short cylinder containing four or more reeds and a set of sliders that select which notes sound. Part of the reason it was made bellows-blown was social: it was considered unseemly for a woman to play any instrument she had to put in her mouth.
Beyond those, the gaita of Galicia and Asturias remains a mainstream popular instrument in northern Spain; Hungary’s duda carries a drone running parallel to the chanter in the same piece of wood; and the Estonian torupill, the Majorcan xeremias, the Greek tsambouna and the Italian zampogna are all still made and played. Most were revived in the last fifty years by a handful of people each.
Which one can you actually learn?
The honest answer has less to do with the instruments than with supply.
The Highland pipe is the one with infrastructure. There are pipe bands in most large towns in the English-speaking world, teachers attached to them, a tutor book industry, and a graded body of music. You can start tonight for the price of a chanter.
The uilleann pipes are at the other extreme, and the numbers are worth stating plainly. Na Píobairí Uilleann’s directory of pipe makers lists around fifty workshops in the entire world, fifteen of them in Ireland and the rest scattered from Vermont to Queensland. Most are one person. There is an old joke among pipers that the instrument takes twenty-one years to master, of which the first seven are spent saving up for a set — which is a joke about the waiting list.
Border pipes, Scottish smallpipes and Northumbrian pipes sit in between: real makers, real teachers, small numbers, and nothing you will find in a shop by accident.
The practical consequence is a piece of luck. A Highland practice chanter teaches the fingering used by the Highland pipe, the Border pipes and the Scottish smallpipes — three of the five, on one $90 instrument. It teaches you nothing about the uilleann pipes, which have a fingering system of their own, or the Northumbrian, which uncovers one hole at a time. So if the Scottish family is where you are heading, the first purchase is settled and it is the same purchase either way.
What to buy first
A practice chanter is a chanter with a mouthpiece and no bag and no drones. It uses a smaller, softer reed, so it is quiet and takes almost no air, and it exists so you can learn the fingering and the grace notes without also fighting the bag. Experienced pipers keep one for learning new tunes.
Two things decide which one to get. The first is material. Polypenco, an acetal plastic, does not absorb moisture, swell or crack, and every serious maker uses it for practice chanters; R.G. Hardie line the inside of their blackwood models with plastic for exactly that reason, because the top of a wooden chanter splits. The cheap rosewood chanters have no such protection and are the ones buyers rate around three stars while the Scottish-made plastic ones sit above four and a half.
The second is length. Makers offer three: junior, standard and long, sometimes called extended. R.G. Hardie puts the junior at children aged ten and under. The long one matches the profile of a real pipe chanter, so the hole spacing your fingers learn is the spacing they will meet on the pipes — which is why it is the one to buy if the plan is to end up on a full set.
McCallum Extended Length Practice Chanter
- Extended length, matching pipe chanter spacing
- Polypenco body
- Scottish reed included and tested
- Made in Kilmarnock, Scotland
- Also sold in standard and junior lengths
- ~$90
McCallum builds in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, and makes the pipe chanters that championship-winning bands compete on as well as the practice ones — which says more about the tolerances than any description of a practice chanter can. The extended chanter is the adult default: the tube is close to the length of the pipe chanter you are working toward, so when you eventually pick up a full set your hands already know where the holes are.
The reed is the part that matters and it is the part cheap chanters skimp on. A practice chanter reed has to speak at low pressure, hold its pitch as it warms and stay balanced from bottom hand to top, and there is nothing a beginner can do to fix one that will not. It ships with a tested Scottish reed rather than whatever was in the box.
Polypenco is the right material here rather than the cheap one. It ignores the damp that a mouth-blown instrument lives in permanently, so it will not swell, crack at the top or shift its bore over a winter of practice.
- Finger spacing matches a real pipe chanter
- Reed supplied is tested rather than whatever was in the box
- Polypenco will not split or swell in a wet instrument
- From a maker whose pipe chanters win world championships
- Roughly six times what a rosewood chanter costs
- The extended length is a stretch for small hands — get the junior instead
- No moisture trap, so it wants separating to dry after playing
R.G. Hardie Extended Length Practice Chanter, Twist Trap
- Extended length
- Twist Trap moisture trap in the top joint
- Delrin / polypenco body
- Counter-sunk finger holes
- Reed included
- Made in Glasgow, Scotland
- ~$90
The same money as the McCallum, from a Glasgow workshop founded in a garden shed in 1950 and now run by a former Pipe Sergeant of Field Marshal Montgomery. One design difference is worth understanding. The Twist Trap is a moisture trap built into the top of the chanter and it is R.G. Hardie’s own — nobody else fits one. Condensation collects there instead of running down onto the reed.
Whether that matters depends on you. Some players flood a reed in twenty minutes and some never do, and it is not something you can predict before you start. A soaked reed goes flat, then sharp, then stops, and a beginner has no way to tell that from their own playing being wrong — which is the actual case for the trap.
The finger holes are counter-sunk, slightly dished, so the fingertip finds the edge without looking. On an instrument where you are trying to build muscle memory rather than aim, that is more useful than it sounds.
- Moisture trap keeps the reed dry through a long session
- Counter-sunk holes make the hand position easier to learn
- Same price as the plain Scottish-made chanters
- Made in Glasgow by a firm that has been building pipes since 1950
- The trap is another part to unscrew and empty
- If you are not a player who floods reeds, you are paying for a part you will never need
- Same stretch as any extended chanter for a small hand
R.G. Hardie Junior Length Practice Chanter, Twist Trap
- Junior length, closer hole spacing
- Twist Trap moisture trap
- Delrin / polypenco body
- Reed included
- Made in Glasgow, Scotland
- ~$80
R.G. Hardie specifies the junior length for children aged ten and under, and the reason is simply reach: the holes are closer together, so a small hand can seal all of them without the fingers splaying. A child on an adult chanter learns to compensate, and the compensation has to be unlearned later.
It is the same body material, the same moisture trap and the same reed quality as the adult chanter, and it costs about ten dollars less. The only thing being given up is that the spacing does not match a full-size pipe chanter — which is irrelevant for several years, and by the time it matters the child has grown into a standard one anyway.
- Hole spacing a small hand can actually cover
- Same build and reed as the adult chanters
- Cheaper than the full-length version
- Will be outgrown, so it is a bridge rather than a purchase for life
- Spacing does not prepare the hand for a pipe chanter
- Still $80 for a child who may last three weeks
And a book
Bagpipe music is not written like other music. The grace notes are the technique, they are notated in a shorthand of their own, and no amount of general musical literacy tells you what a taorluath is. A tutor is not optional in the way it is on a guitar.
The Hal Leonard Bagpipe Method by Ron Bowen and Sarajane Trier is written specifically for people starting on the Great Highland bagpipe and costs around $15. It covers the notation, the grace-noting and the embellishments in order, with diagrams and photographs, and the current edition includes an access code for the recorded examples and video demonstrations online — which for ornaments is worth more than the printed page, because you cannot tell from a diagram how fast a doubling is supposed to be.
For the Irish side, H. J. Clarke’s The New Approach to Uilleann Piping is the Ossian tutor, around $27 with a CD, and it takes an absolute beginner through to the regulators. Read it before you commit to the instrument rather than after: it is the cheapest way to find out what those twenty-one years are actually made of.
Common questions
Which type of bagpipe is easiest to play?
Fewest notes and physically easiest are two different questions, and the Highland pipe wins the first and loses the second. Nine notes is as simple as a scale gets, but the Highland pipe is a high-pressure instrument that needs a stiff, sustained blow, and getting a steady tone out of one is a physical skill that takes months. A bellows-blown smallpipe removes the blowing from the problem entirely and plays on a fraction of the pressure.
In practice the deciding factor is not the instrument. It is whether there is anyone within driving distance who plays one, and for most people that answer is Highland.
What is the difference between Irish and Scottish bagpipes?
The Irish uilleann pipes are bellows-blown, sit on the lap, play two chromatic octaves, and carry three keyed regulators that let the player accompany themselves. The Scottish Great Highland pipe is mouth-blown, played standing, has nine notes and no accidentals, and is loud enough to be an outdoor instrument. They are about as different as two bagpipes can be, and Scotland also has two quieter bellows-blown pipes of its own.
How many types of bagpipe are there?
Over a hundred still played, by the Bagpipe Society’s count, spread across Europe, North Africa and West Asia. The number depends on where you draw the line between a distinct instrument and a regional variant — central France alone has half a dozen names for closely related pipes.
Do I have to start on a practice chanter?
For the Highland pipes, yes, and every teacher will insist on it. The bag, the drones and the chanter are three problems, and the chanter is the one carrying the music. Six months to a year is the usual stretch before a first set of pipes, and the chanter stays in the case afterward for learning new tunes.
Are bagpipes a woodwind instrument?
Yes. The chanter is a reed pipe — a double reed on the Highland and uilleann chanters, a single reed on the drones and on some Continental pipes — and the bag is only an air reservoir. Na Píobairí Uilleann describe the uilleann chanter as a woodwind whose nearest orchestral relative is the oboe.
Related reading
- Best bagpipes for beginners — what a first full set involves
- How much do bagpipes cost? — from a chanter to a competition set
- How long does it take to learn the bagpipes? — chanter first, then the bag
- Why are bagpipes played at funerals? — where the Highland pipe’s association with mourning comes from
- Woodwind instruments — the family the chanter belongs to