Eric's Piping Page

Contents

• The tuning pitch for various pipebands
• Typesetting highland bagpipe music using abc2ps
• Links to other bagpipe pages

The tuning pitch for various pipebands

I've analyzed some commercial digital recordings and some of my own field recordings to determine the pitch that various bands tune their pipes to.

• Track, Time - The location in the recording that was analyzed.
• Pitch - The ratio (in cents) of the pitch of the tenor drones relative to Bb calibrated at A=440Hz.
• Temp, Weather - The high temperature for the day in degrees Farenheit.
• Technical details are listed below for those who are interested.

• Track, Time - The location in the recording where the center of the analysis window was positioned. I keep track of this in case I need to go back and reverify my analysis. I typically look for long notes of 0.5 second duration, with no drumming (especially bass or tenor drumming). These usually occur in the slow air section of a medley or in the break between the march and strathspey in an MSR. If I can't find a long enough note, then I look for a section with fingerwork just in the upper hand. I typically use an FFT length of 8192 samples (0.18 seconds) for signals sampled at 44100 Hz. This gives me adequate resolution for the frequencies present in the drones (along with some extra averaging), without substantial energy from transient signals impacting the measurement.
• Pitch - The ratio (in cents) of the pitch of the tenor drones relative to the equal tempered Bb that is one octave below A=440Hz. Technically I estimate the pitch by computing the frequency of the spectral component that is near 235Hz. One cent is a frequency ratio of 2^(1/1200) which is approximately 1.00057779. There are 100 cents in a semitone and 1200 cents in an octave. I typically see +/-3 cents variation in the result, depending on the exact position of the analysis window and which channel (L/R) I analyze. Note: Setting the reference pitch of the Korg CA20 to 449 causes the zero position on the meter to be 35 cents higher in frequency than for the 440 setting.
• Temp, Weather - The high temperature for the day in degrees Farenheit (as reported by the most local weather observation station). I include temperature and climate info, because it has a noticable effect on the tuning pitch.

Last Update: 29 Sept 2000