Bagpipes

[OC Richard]

As pointed out above, most pipers are really picking up the timing and feel of the melody by ear, and using the sheet music for the fingering and the ornamentation.

So you don't need to be able to sightread in the normal sense in order to learn tunes as most pipers do, you just have be able to associate certain dots with certain fingers.

As you might well already know, how pipe bands tend to learn tunes is to have all the pipers sit around a big table with their Practice Chanters. The Pipe Major hands out the sheet music to everyone, then models how the tune sounds. You can watch his fingers and listen and figure out the tune very easily without looking at the music, that's what I do.

Once in a blue moon I might have to reference the music for a particular gracenote- usually not because I can't copy what the Pipe Major is playing, but because the other pipers are playing an ornament that's different from what he's playing. This is usually because the Pipe Major is previously familiar with the tune and is playing the version he already knows, which differs from the version he handed out to everybody.

This sort of thing happens all the time because pipers usually aren't actually sightreading the sheet music in front of them, as an ordinary musician would do.

By the way, lower-level pipe bands, say non-competition bands and Grade 5 and 4 bands, are usually playing music with far more ornamentation than the band is capable of cleanly playing. My philosophy is that any ornament that the entire band can't play cleanly and together should be cut out of the music.