Getting yourself pipes is a wonderful present! But get some competent help when you start. Really. All of us who play (even those who've been at it a long time) can probably remember what it was like when we first tried playing the full pipes. Horrible! Discouraging! Frustrating! And having a decent instructor there for those two months of transitioning from the practice chanter to the pipes makes all the difference. An experienced piper can also help you to get your reeds set for an efficient (or as close as it gets) setup with good tone. Half an hour with my instructor did more good than two weeks on my own. The price of lessons is a very small investment. And if all you want to do is play with them, it is worth the price to get help setting up and getting going on them. Really.

I am not an advocate of self-teaching, though there are some who have done it successfully. I've never met one, though. But you may have the discipline to do it, so I'm not going to nay-say you.

I've heard good things about Dunbar poly pipes, but the P1s I examined didn't impress me much. These things go for around $800 most places, with reeds. For less than a hundred bucks more, you could get McCallum AB0 pipes with blackwood drones. And all the reeds and such. I got mine from John Higgins and was pleased with the service and setup.

My out-there ramblings: I see no real need for someone to spend a year on the practice chanter before playing the pipes. Several months, yes. Some folks could probably start on the pipes within two months, most of the rest in about 4 months. I think we should introduce the pipes earlier in the usual learning curve. Get the scale and some basic ornaments (gracenotes and doublings), then learn two tunes (Scots Wha Hae and Amazing Grace, probably, with simplified ornamentation), then right to the pipes. I think part of the high attrition rate comes from spending a year without ever playing the instrument you are trying to learn to play! It will take a couple of months, as mentioned before, to get to where you can comfortably play an entire tune (even a short one) on the big pipes. But if you are spending that time learning two more tunes, then by the time you have been at it for six months, you should be able to play four tunes recognizably on the bagpipes. I just think we do it backwards when it comes to teaching. We spend forever drilling technique on the practice chanter (this is vital, though, as all the technique is learned on the simpler instrument), learn a bunch of ornaments we won't use for a year or more, then we learn a simple tune and play it to death. Then we learn another simple tune. We practice all of this for a year before we achieve the zen-like state where we are allowed to start blowing on the enormous armored octopus that won't stay on our shoulder and we get all discouraged because it feels like we are starting over again! Give us a taste of what it is like first and give us permission to practice the real instrument once we have the basic modicum of technique and I think more people would progress to playing music on their pipes in less than a year. Okay, end of my ravings.

So, here's hoping you stick with it. My instructor once said that out of every ten people who call for lessons, only one actually shows up and starts playing the practice chanter. For every ten people who do start, only one progresses onto the full pipes. Kind of a big dropout rate. But that one in a hundred becomes a piper!

So, I guess you could say we are proud to be one-percenters!

-Patrick