How to Balance the Bagpipe Pitch

Video Transcript

"NEIL HUBBARD: So now we're going to talk about tuning and actually tuning the instrument. The way to tune the chanter is by moving the chanter reed in or out. What you want is a nice balance between the low A and the high A, a nice octave interval. The intervals between the other notes on the chanter are not standard western intervals. Some of them are slightly sharper than others, some of them are slightly flat than the standard interval. So, the scale on the bagpipe is. Putting the chanter into the pipe, I'll now demonstrate how you can get a better sense of the balance of the chanter. So, what I did was, I set 1 drone to the low A, played the low A, and then I played a high A to see if it was a good pitch. Right now the chanter is slightly flat on the high hand, so I had to move the drone up just a bit to get that balance. I would need to go back and put either some tape over this or change the position of the reed to flatten that top hand a little bit."