Having read
Peter's Pearl on
Bagpipes ..
http://www.ar-group.org/smforum/index.php?topic=3123.0.. I have hunted out my recording of
Mull of Kintyre.
First, a reminder of the salient points mentioned by Peter.
The bagpipes consist of an air supply, a Bag, a Chanter and a Drone (sometimes more than one). The Chanter is the melody pipe, and the Drone just 'drones' on and on.
The piper emits a
continuous, even sound throughout his rendition. There are no pauses, or rests at all. So don’t allow your fingers to ever be idle. Rather run one note into another. You must get your bass to emulate the sound of the drone .. literally droning on by constantly sounding the same note. Your fingers, however, should never take a breather. On a bagpipe
you can't make the same note sound twice, so have to 'skip' elsewhere and come back to the note to hear it sound again. For this reason you have to do
something to distinguish between two identical consecutive notes.
Here is Peter's music showing how a piper would play those extra 'skipping' notes, or 'grace notes'. I have noticed that in this music there are 'grace notes' between
every note of the melody, not just where two notes follow on that are the same. Presumably this is what Peter means by saying, "Your fingers, however, should never take a breather."
Here is the YouTube video of a Piper playing.