Piping

Notes Extracted from “The New Melody Directory: Highland Bagpipe”

ISBN Vol. 1: 1 86252 976 0, ISBN Vol. 2: 1 86252 977 9, ISBN Overall: 1 86252 978 7 (set).

The following are just a few of the notes included in the book, which contains over 10,000 entries from over 200 piping books:

CODING: Examples of how the melody is coded and sorted are given hereunder. It was decided that the most appropriate way would be for the timing of the tune, in beats, to be indicated. This has been done in almost all cases except for piobaireachd, where some books have been coded “continuously”. As the number of notes per beat in piobaireachd is small, this has allowed a wider separation of tunes, and also overcomes the difficulty many people experience when trying to write piobaireachd in conventional form. Because most tunes appear in print more than once, most will be noted both ways.

The method is simple – Low G, Low A, B, C, D, E, and F are coded as g, a, b, c, d, e, and f (lowercase) and High G and High A are coded as G and A (uppercase) respectively. Starting notes, while indicated where shown in any book, are not included in the sorting process. This is because they may be varied by individuals to fit in with tunes preceding the particular tune concerned, and do not necessarily form part of the tune.

TIMING: The timing of all included notes is also shown, so that it is possible to write down the starting notes and first four beats of the tune in staff notation. With a little practice, it is possible to sight read the notes and timing simultaneously. Hence, the tune can be played straight off (for the first four beats), as there is a one to one correspondence between notes and timing. To facilitate this relationship, it was decided that undotted semibreves, minims, crotchets, quavers, semiquavers, and demi-semiquavers should be shown as o, m, c, q, s and d (lowercase) respectively. Dotted minims, crotchets etc. are shown as O, M, C, Q, S, and D (uppercase) respectively.

MELODY NOTES AND GRACENOTES: Naturally, only melody notes have been included. Gracenotes merely embellish and enhance the melody, which can be played and recognized without the addition of any gracenotes.

Modern bagpipe terminology has evolved so that melody notes (ie the notes which together form the basic tune) are shown with large “heads” and with “stems” (if any) always descending from the head.

Gracenotes (ie those short notes which merely serve to separate notes of the same pitch, and to enhance and make more interesting the basic melody) are differentiated from melody notes by having small heads, with stems pointing upward. Gracenotes always have stems and at least one “tail” (usually three, to indicate that they are of short duration).

SAMPLE: The introductory E and the first four beats of the well know tune “Scotland the Brave” are coded thus:

e | a ab ca ce | with corresponding timing: q | c Qs qq qq |

And “Glendaruel Highlanders” thus:

And so on….

According to Ross Campbell (a leading Australian piper, and long time Bagpipe Tutor at Scotch College) in his testimonial, “because only familiar symbols have been used, a half hour of study should see you well on the way to reaping the benefits of this index of all indexes”.

Enquiries and correspondence regarding The New Melody Directory can be made by email to Donald Chalmers.