Tune, Holme's Fancy, played on an early form Northumbrian smallpipe by Pauline Cato (audio clip)

Northumbrian smallpipe, bellows blown, of the type played in the early 19th century. The chanter is stopped at the end, and is played using a closed fingering system in which a single finger raised from the chanter produces the desired note. Articulation between the notes is produced by the momentary silence when all the holes are covered, producing a distinctive staccato effect. This is an indoor instrument, characterised by sweet tone, and rich harmonics between chanter and drones.

Early Northumbrian chanters are unkeyed, producing a scale of only eight notes. Like Scottish smallpipes, three drones are mounted in a common stock. The tune being played, Holme's Fancy, is taken from an early collection of Northumbrian pipe music Peacock's Tunes, printed in Newcastle in the first decade of the 19th century.

Small pipes are a small version of the bagpipe which has been made and played in Scotland but which has been most familiar in Britain in the form of the Northumbrian Pipes, a small, bellows-blown instrument with a keyed chanter and variable drone accompaniment. Both Northumbrian Pipes and the Scottish small pipes probably derive from a Continental bellows-blown bagpipe developed by wind-instrument makers in European cities in the 17th century for chamber music and operatic performance by professional musicians. Known as the musette in France, it became a fashionable instrument in the late 17th and 18th centuries for court and drawing room recital.

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