Learning the Great Highland bagpipe on the Practice Chanter

The Great Highland Bagpipe has survived and flourished largely through the enthusiastic patronage of the British Army. It became a fixed principle that the Scottish Regiments should have pipers and pipe bands and the phenomenon of the Pipe Band originated in the Army, particularly in the 19th century when from 1854 numbers of pipers were officially adopted by individual regiments with the sanction of the War Office. The Highland bagpipe became the principal musical instrument of the Scottish Regiments in the British Army and this has created or strengthened its role as the perceived national instrument of the country.

In its origins, the Highland bagpipe in common with other European and World bagpipes is a prehistoric wind instrument. Its main elements are the melody pipe or 'chanter' on which the music is played with the fingers (usually on a scale of nine notes). The 'practice chanter' has developed as a separate instrument in a smaller form of the bagpipe chanter. It holds a double reed sounding a lower pitch and this is covered and protected by a cap with a mouthpiece into which the player blows directly.

The use of the Great Highland Bagpipe in the Army, the development of civilian pipe bands and the growing significance of competition meant that the instrument began to take on a fixed and standard form and proportions, for example with its wide bored chanter and bass and two tenor drones. Skilled craftsmen, often wood turners by profession, began to make the instrument more or less to a fixed pattern and also to make practice chanters in large quantities for a growing trade, particularly encouraged by the demands of the Army for pipers.

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