Piping for Marine Corps Officer Commissioning

[highland mafia]

Hey! Cool pics. How do you like that Saul tuner??? Just got one for the our band. But still trying to play around with it.

[Barb T]

Hey! Cool pics. How do you like that Saul tuner??? Just got one for the our band. But still trying to play around with it.

Absolutely unbelievable. Our band bought one for each of our pipers, and it has totally transformed our ability to tune quickly and precisely. We've used hand held Korg electronic tuners for years (both for drones and chanters), but they have limitations for getting a band into precise tune. With the old tuners, several of our pipers with good pitch still had to fine tune everyone in the band, a time-consuming process (although with Korg tuners set up on music stands, everyone could get close before fine tuning).

We've now had the Saul tuners for about 6 months, and several things happened. Because it's so easy to tune both chanter and drones, every piper is playing in tune at home during practice. This is particularly crucial for our Grade 5 pipers, because they are learning what pipes ought to sound like when in tune, and they can also monitor their blowing by watching the drone tuning in real time as they play (and it's much easier than using a manometer). Same is true to a certain extent for our Grade 4 pipers. Our Grade 3 pipers typically don't need any of that, but they do use them for tuning for gigs and competitions.

The other thing that's happened is that we can tune a band of 25 pipers in about 20 minutes. When we get to a gig, we all play for about 10-15 minutes by ourselves to warm up our pipes, then we all take a reading on low A, and the pipe major decides what the # will be for the day. We then each tune our own chanters and drones, and because the leads are on each drone stock and chanter stock, we can do it all in the same room, if we have to. Takes about 5 minutes to tune the drones and move tape on the chanter for individual notes, and then we all play together for another 10 minutes or so. People fix any specific note issues using their own tuners, and we're read to go.

It's absolutely amazing. We're still tinkering with how we use them, but we played three parades yesterday in three very different weather conditions, and the whole band sounded better each time than when we used to go through an hour of warm-up and individual fine tuning.

Having said all this, it only works if each piper has a tuner. I don't really know how you'd use it in a band setting if you only had one tuner, because the leads are taped directly to the drone and chanter stocks - only one person would have the advantage of the tuner.

Oh - and we do remove them before playing a gig. The second pic of me was taken during the rehearsal for the ceremony before I had done the final tuning!