after a 1 year delay, ill finally engage with one of my goals in New Zealand - to learn to play Great Highland Bagpipe.


I love almost everything Celtic, from Gaelic language to celtic music. and of course when you talk about Celtic music, nothing springs in peoples mind faster than a kilted man playing highland pipes. For years, ive kept the hope of learning bagpipes, due to me unable to find any instructors in malaysia, and the fact that im too poor to afford a decent bagpipe.

But things changed 2 days ago. my forum posting in a pipe band forum was replied with a man offering to tutor me. instantly i said yes. without realizing that i have to travel quite a distance to get to the practice place. its about 30 minute train ride from Britomart (auckland's KL Sentral).

Its a recently restarted grade 4 pipe band, called Otahuhu pipe band. people there are welcoming and helpful. i also found my ex-band mate who played pipes with me at CAPB. and guess what, he volunteered to tutor me. of course, in exchange of my tutoring him drumming.

i started the session with a practice chanter.

its basically a stripped down version of a bagpipe. instead of blowing into a bag and squeeze the air out, all you do is blow right into the chanter - much like a recorder.

a new player doesnt start right away blowing full bagpipes, due to various reasons.

1. youll need strong lip muscles and lungs to blow into a bagpipe. usually new players doesnt have the power or stamina to do so. using practice chanter helps build up lip muscle and lung power.

2. a bagpipe is actually 4 instruments, 1 chanter (lead) 2 drones (melody) and 1 Bass drone (bass). if you start by trying to play 4 instruments right away, imagine the noise, and how fast those noise can kill off your enthusiasm. practice chanter let you work on the 1st instrument (lead) and as you build up your confidence, you take on those drones.

3. as your mouth is not directly on the reed - you cant stop the bagpipe midway through the playing. you cant play things like staccato either. so once you got the bagpipe ringing, there is no looking back, ya gotta keep on playing. if you have no idea of what you are going to play, imagine the noise youll make when pausing to look at your fingering chart. practice chanter allows you to polish you fingering before trying it out on your pipes.

a lot more to go....

so on my first lesson, i learned the basic common 9 fingerings avaiable on a highland bagpipe. its quite interesting that a highland bagpipe plays on a mixolydian mode scale, which doesnt sound like your typical do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. its do-re-mi-fa-so-li-ti-do.

its quite hard to blow air into the chanter too. for my case, i have the lung power needed, but i dun have lip muscles strong enough to force the air. so when i play the chanter, you can hear the "pancit" or "lau hong" sound.

ill have quite a lot to work on, from finger position to keeping constant pressure on the chanter, that will take me weeks.

ive set a goal of wanting to be on a bagpipe and play a few tunes before the end of this year. lets see if that will happen!