Bagpipes
reed wind instrument which in its commonest forms consists of a chanter and one or more drones, all supplied with air from the bag, which is compressed under the player’s arm to provide a constant pressure
The bagpipe is a woodwind instrument using enclosed reeds fed from a constant reservoir of air in the form of a bag. The Scottish Great Highland bagpipe is well known, but people have played bagpipes for centuries throughout large parts of Europe, North Africa, West Asia, around the Persian Gulf and northern parts of South Asia.
The term bagpipes is also used, though pipers usually refer to the bagpipes as "the pipes", "a set of pipes" or "a stand of pipes".
Bagpipes are part of the aerophone group because to play the instrument, air must be blown into it to produce a sound.
Construction
A set of bagpipes minimally consists of an air supply, a bag, a chanter, and usually at least one drone. Many bagpipes have more than one drone (and, sometimes, more than one chanter) in various combinations, held in place in stocks—sockets that fasten the various pipes to the bag.
Air supply
The most common method of supplying air to the bag is through blowing into a blowpipe or blowstick. In some pipes the player must cover the tip of the blowpipe with the tongue while inhaling, in order to prevent unwanted deflation of the bag, but most blowpipes have a non-return valve that eliminates this need. In recent times, there are many instruments that assist in creating a clean air flow to the pipes and assist the collection of condensation.
The use of a bellows to supply air is an innovation dating from the 16th or 17th century.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Bagpipes” is reed wind instrument which in its commonest forms consists of a chanter and one or more drones, all supplied with air from the bag, which is compressed under the player’s arm to provide a constant pressure. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Bagpipes, reed and wind, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8347. The Library of Congress control number is sh85010971. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bagpipes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.