App Detail » Bagpipes Pro

Published by: Michael Eskin

iPad App - Designed for iPad

Price: $2.99
Current Version: 4.6
Released: November 01, 2011

What's New

This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.

Doubled the width of the detect zones to make it easier to play with flatter fingers, more in the traditional style.

For best results when playing with flatter fingers, turn off the on-screen controls.

App Description

Bagpipes Pro is five extremely realistic sounding sets of bagpipes for the iPad that are played using standard Scottish piping fingerings.

The instrument may be transposed up to +/- one octave in semitone increments as well as tuned up to +/- 50 cents.

It includes five authentic sounding sets of Scottish, Irish, and Swedish bagpipes.

The five sets of bagpipes are:

Great Highland Scottish Bagpipes - The most popular Scottish marching pipes, in the traditional key of Bb.

Scottish Border Pipes - A Scottish smallpipe in the key of A with a sound distinctly different from but similar to the Highland pipes.

Scottish Smallpipes - A Scottish smallpipe in the key of A, one octave lower than the Border Pipes, and has a rounder, bubbly sound.

Irish Uillean Pipes - Bellows blown pipes in the key of D

Swedish Säckpipa - A set of Swedish bagpipes in E, with a very haunting sound.

All of the instruments use fingerings based on the standard Scottish Highland bagpipes chanter.

IMPORTANT: Since this app requires as many as 8 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. Select standard or alternate drone note from the controls.

Use the Transpose slider to set the overall instrument transposition in semitones. Touch the transpose value to the left of the slider to reset the transposition to zero.

Use the Tuning slider to set the overall instrument tuning offset in cents. Touch the tuning value to the left of the slider to reset the tuning offset to zero.

To play the chanter, touch the bar at the top left with your left thumb. This bar is the hole normally 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 "i" to show/hide the live performance controls.

Touch the "?" for on-screen help.

Audio samples for the Säckpipa provided by Jonathan Parker from an instrument made in 1986 by Leif Eriksson.

Drone puck image courtesy of Mike DeSmidt.