Uilleann - Play the Irish Bagpipes (Key of B, Traditional Chanter) icon

App Detail » Uilleann - Play the Irish Bagpipes (Key of B, Traditional Chanter)

Published by: Michael Eskin

iPad App - Designed for iPad

Price: $2.99
Current Version: 4.3
Released: April 29, 2010

What's New

Major pitch bending and reverb audio quality improvements since the last update.

A huge thank you to Jesse Chappell at ThumbJam for helping me diagnose and ultimately fix the pitch bend/reverb issue introduced in the last update.

App Description

Play the Irish Bagpipes on your iPad!

Uilleann is an authentic sounding flat set of Irish bagpipes in the key of B that is played like the real instrument.

Compared to the Uilleann app in D, this one has a deeper, mellower sound.

The chanter fingerings are based on those used for the Uilleann pipes and will also be immediately familiar to Irish pennywhistle and flute players.

The Uilleann (pronounced "ill-in") pipes are a bellows driven set of bagpipes with a two octave range. They are most commonly used for playing traditional Irish dance music and slow airs. In recent years they have been made popular by shows such as Riverdance, as well as many motion picture soundtracks such as "Waking Ned Devine", "Titanic", and "Braveheart".

This app emulates the three drones and chanter of a half set of "flat" pitch Uilleann pipes in the key of B.

The chanter fingerings are essentially identical to the actual instrument.

How to Play:

IMPORTANT: Since this app requires as many as 9 fingers on the screen at the same time, before playing, disable "Multitasking Gestures" on your iPad (in the Settings app, under the General section, turn the Multitasking Gestures switch to the off position).

Start/stop the drones playing by touching the drone puck.

To play the chanter, touch the bar at the top left with your left thumb. This bar is the "Back D" hole on the back of a real chanter and must be covered for the lower notes to play.

Next, touch the top three holes of the chanter starting with the tips of your left index, middle, and ring fingers.

Finally, touch the bottom four holes of the chanter with the tips of your right index, middle, ring, and little fingers.

Touch the grey block next to the chanter with your left little finger to play the notes one octave higher.

Touch the grey block under the drone with your right thumb to stop the chanter sound. This may be used to play repeated or separated notes.

Touch the "i" to bring up the volume and reverb controls. All values are saved for next time the app is run.

Touch the "?" for on-screen help.

Optional finger vibrato may be done by touching holes below the main closed holes used for a note. Set the depth of the vibrato with the "Vibrato Depth" slider.

Optional upward note bending is done by sliding the finger right or left very slightly from the root tone hole. The sensitivity to pitch be set using the "Note Bend Null Zone" slider.

Play along with tunes in your iPad's music library by starting a track using the iPad iTunes app, then launching Uilleann-B.

Sound is based on high quality per-note chanter and drone recordings from my personal concert pitch set of Uilleann pipes.

Chanter image based on my Kirk Lynch concert pitch chanter. Drone puck image courtesy of Mike DeSmidt. Crowley drone sample courtesy of Vinnie Kilduff.