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Sounds of the Drones

Drone Sounds of the GHB

Below are mp3 recordings of great highland bagpipe drones made by various makers coupled with many of the modern drone reeds that are commercially available. If you would like to contribute, please email your audio file to me using the email found on my homepage (at the top in the banner). All the files found here are mp3 files.

When making your recording, please keep some things in mind. 1. Do not record in an auditorium; there will be all kinds of re-verb which obfuscates the bare tone of your pipes. I record in the bedroom. 2. If recording with .mp3, use at least 160 kbps and use a constant bitrate. 3. Recordings emailed to me in lossless formats will be re-encoded to .mp3 format using ffmpeg (libmp3lame) at 320 kbps. 4. Do not use computer microphones, that is: web cam mics, laptop mics, etc. While unlike the chanter, the drone may not overpower these microphones (called clipping), these microphones (even on an iPhone) can severely attenuate the frequencies that aren't usually associated with the human voice as they are designed to capture speaking. More than likely, the bass drone will be under-captured (not a word, I know) because its fundamental is just a hair over 100 Hz which is well into the attenuation zone of most of these products. I use a Zoom H2 field recorder which captures raw audio.

Some will rightly say that no recording can accurately capture the sound of the bagpipe, least of all homemade recordings. Variability between rooms, microphones, and then even on the your end listening through whatever tiny laptop or huge studio quality speakers, will affect your ability to truly hear what these pipes sounded like. I say, a recording is worth a thousand words! We hear bagpipes in all different kinds of rooms in person (or even outdoors, no joke) and generally, as long as you realize you are sitting at home/work in front of a computer listening to some digitized form of bagpipe audio, I don't think we'll have any problems with anyone thinking that these recordings are a poor reflection of the pipes or reeds. Take from them what you will. If you go comatose from the pure splendor of these recordings or piss off your wife because the non-stop bagpipe droning was just too much (let's be honest, this gets pretty tedious after a while), obviously that is not my fault. Use at your own risk. I have indicated, by first name, who made each recording so that you know which ones are closer comparisons as you might assume all the recordings from the same person were under similar conditions.

A listing of bagpipe drone specifications compiled by many people can be found here.

Audio files requiring attribution: