Practice Chanter Newbee

[imrichmond]

I am thinking it would be nice if chanters had the holes offset for right and left hands so the wrists are in a more natural, less bent angle. I don't know if this would cause playing issues or not in the future. I see a lot of highly bent wrists and bent fingers watching pipers playing. I suspect one leads to the other in trying to ease the wrist angles. I can see this is less severe with a bag under the left arm "propping" it up. It would bring the straight fingers more onto the same plane with the chanter rotated slightly to the right.

I'm not really sure what you are seeing here, unless you are watching mostly pipers who never learned proper technique. When playing the pipes, the wrists should not be held at an angle, let alone at a severe angle. This is true also when playing the practice chanter. On the practice chanter, the wrists usually become bent at a significant angle because the player is holding his/her elbows tight to the body. The elbows should be held out from the body far enough that the wrists can be held straight and relaxed, basically in line with the thumbs. Holding the elbows tight against the body is a problem common to beginners and also often leads them to curl their fingers around the chanter. Similarly, when playing the bagpipe, the wrists are often bent because the player has the bad habit of pulling the chanter inwards towards the body. Both these errors cause tension in the fingers. In the case of the bagpipe, the problem can be caused by a bag that is either too large or the wrong shape for the player and/or a blowstick that is too long. A properly fitted bagpipe should cause no discomfort in the wrists and certainly should not cause them to be "highly bent".