Small Pipes

[OC Richard]

When I purchased a set of the common stock/Northumbrian style smallpipes in A, I soon discovered they were a very different instrument and not completely suited for GHB practice...the holes have a slightly different placement and low A is pitched about 440. I suspect if I used the smallpipes in lieu of the practice chanter, bad habits would follow.

This raises the important point that traditional Highland practice chanters were never intended to be musical instruments per se, but practice tools. The holes were placed to simulate the actual Highland pipe chanter's hole-spacing, not where they needed to be to produce an in-tune scale.

Ironically, when Highland pipe makers began moving the holes on the Great Highland pipe chanter (starting around 1980) they kept making practice chanters the same as before, so that the traditional "standard" size practice chanter was something of a fossil, retaining the old Great Highland chanter hole-spacing.

(Highland pipe makers, starting in the 1980s, moved the High G hole and the D hole further down, and reduced the size slightly, to flatten those two notes.)

But the Scottish smallpipe IS a musical instrument, so the finger-holes need to be placed properly to give an in-tune scale, not to mimic the Great Highland chanter.

Some makers make SSPs in C and Bb, and these are closer to the finger-hole spacing of a Highland practice chanter.

However to get an SSP chanter down in A=440 the finger-holes have to be more widely spaced than on Highland practice chanters as you point out.

The same is true of my McCallum Great Highland pipe chanter in Concert B flat (466).

Personally it doesn't bother me much to switch back and forth between the modern-style McCallum 480 pipe chanter, the McCallum 466 pipe chanter, my John Walsh Scottish smallpipe chanter in 440, and my McCallum "long" practice chanter. In truth the difference in the hole-spacing isn't dramatic.

To put it into perspective, here's a McCallum 480 pipe chanter compared with some of the whistles I play.