I actually did buy a “practice chanter” for the bagpipes, but the fingering is so complex, it was too much for my simple little mind to comprehend. It does make a lovely low “moose-call” of a sound.
Also, purely because it’s so wild, I got an “electronic bagpipes” practice chanter. You can use it with earphones, and not annoy the neighbors at all.
For a while, one of my neighbors was learning the bagpipes. The first few weeks were awful, but eventually he got to the point where it was actually musical, and I enjoyed it.
That’s getting into a range I can afford! (My circumstances are not as lavish as once they were.) Thank you kindly!
The basic notes aren’t that difficult. There’s only nine, after all.
What makes it complicated is the grace notes, the combination of wee notes played in between the melody notes.
The reason they play such an important role is that since the air pressure from the bag is constant, there’s no way to put in a rest. The grace notes play that role, to introduce a bit of rhythm which the rest plays with other instruments.
I just want to bang on the drum all day? I know a bloke who bongoes, and it does actually look like fun. Being a Renaissance music fan, I groove on the background drums from such things as Jacobean and Elizabethan dances. But I hanker for a melody…
I did once make a percussion instrument out of a mailbox and some light bulbs. You drop the bulb into the box, and shake. Banka-bonka-bonka-Banka-Bonka- POP -Ksshksshhkshhkshh-kshhkshh
I’d never known that about the grace notes! I’m probably not alone in having at first thought that the grace notes were accidents or uncontrolled artifacts; I had it pointed out that they are deliberate, but nobody, before your post, ever told me why!
I also bounced on the rule that you use straightened fingers, and not the fingertips. I couldn’t grok why.
(In the midst of all my searching, I also found some really cute “toy” violins or fiddles, actually electronic instruments rather than stringed. I am not quite good enough to build Laurie Anderson’s fake violin which consists of a bow of recording tape drawn – arco – back and forth over a magnetic read head. The faster the bowing, the higher the note. Damn, that’s clever!)
I also know a bloke who is very good at the didgeridoo. You can hear him pat a mile away.
I don’t understand the claim that the fingerings on a recorder don’t progress naturally. As you go up the scale, you remove a finger. To get a sharp or flat, you skip a hole and put down a finger, or only cover up half a hole.
It’s much more natural than on the cornet, where you go from open to 13 to 12 to 1 to open to 12, to 2 to open to 1 to open for the scale. You pretty much just memorize which fingering goes with which note. Sure, that fingering pattern repeats for the first 3 half octaves (including the low one I left out). And then it gets weird.
And, yes, I know my harmonic series, so I know why it does all that. But I don’t think most people learn them when learning the fingerings.
Looking at a fingering chart, that’s only true for the lowest range of the available notes. After that, and especially at the high end of the range, the fingering goes dramatically non-linear.