Seven days in a kilt...

[MichiganKyle]

You're learning at a great time, due to the internet.

There are tons of online lessons/tutorials. You can hear all the top players performing, both current players and famous players from the past. You can chat with pipers on Skype or Zoom.

When I started, in 1974, all I had was a couple albums to listen to and the College Of Piping "green book".

There were no pipers around to take lessons from, so I was self-taught the first couple years. Happily then my family moved to an area with more people including several Pipe Bands and a large number of good pipers. I worked my tail off and joined a good band in 1977.

I can't encourage you enough to stick with it. You obviously have the musicianship, that's the biggest part of becoming a piper, as it is with any instrument. The rest is diligent practice or "face time" as the jazz guys call it.

It's critical to make sure that you're doing everything right from the very beginning. Some people, due to not knowing, practice their mistakes and ingrain them into their muscle-memory. Then it takes twice as long to get them on the right track.

As they say

"Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect."

I was going to ask what instruments you already play, but in truth it doesn't matter. Many years ago a wise old musician told me

"A musical instrument is merely a mechanical device. The music is in the person."

If you have the music in you, for sure you will become a good piper, if only you diligently and correctly practice the technical details.

Rather nice to hear this right now. I was given a set of bagpipes for Christmas and am now looking more seriously at how to play them. I've been interested in learning them for a while now, but just never devoted the time to getting started. I know there's a pipe band in town, and I've casually talked to one of their members, but that's about as far as I got. Don't know who around here actually teaches lessons. Well, now I've got a reason to learn. I play piano (favorites being ragtime, video game music, and traditional Irish music), and I tend to really like playing highly technically-complicated music so it seems like it'd be a good fit, but I've been rather intimidated by the learning process. Been trying to watch books and read up on it to figure out as much as I can, and have one really difficult to play practice chanter and another on the way in the hopes the feel will be better.

Anyway, the positivity in this comment is nice. Most of the comments I've seen from other pipers have been more along the lines of "It's the most complicated instrument ever! Don't even think about trying to learn the pipes unless you've already got 40 years of experience playing them!" So the idea of actually being able to learn them is...refreshing.