Quote Originally Posted by haukehaien
Easily. You can spend $15, plus shipping on a piece of junk chanter that isn't in tune with itself and that sounds like a mutant duck call rather than an instrument. After that, you can buy a real practice chanter for $50-75 and actually start to learn to play.

Do not buy one of the chanters from Asia; they are (at best) inadequate, and at worst garbage. If you want to learn the pipes, get an instructor and follow his/her advice on which chanter to buy. But whatever you do, don't buy a cheap chanter and expect to learn very much. The pipes are not an instrument that you pick up over the weekend, or even in a few months. If you intend to be any good (and I don't mean "Winning the gold at Oban" good; I mean "Not making everyone in earshot want to be violently ill" good) then you'll be on the chanter for at least a year before you start on the bagpipes. And you'll continue to use the chanter to learn new tunes, to practice embellishments and so on for the rest of your piping life. A good chanter isn't an expense, it's an investment. If you buy a good one and decide the pipes aren't for you, then you can sell it and get most of your investment back.

A bad chanter, on the other hand, will make it even more difficult to learn, or possibly even impossible. And if you decide to sell it, you'll be lucky to see a tenth of your initial cost - unless you rip off someone who doesn't know any better.

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