Every few weeks somebody comes up to us after a parade and says, "I always wanted to learn that." Here's the truth. Anybody can learn the bagpipe. I started at 38 with fingers that had spent nineteen years around steel. It takes patience more than talent, a teacher, and about a year before anyone should hear you. If that doesn't scare you off, read on.

Year One: The Practice Chanter

Nobody starts on the pipes. You start on a practice chanter: a long, narrow wooden or plastic pipe with finger holes and a small reed inside, that you blow into like a recorder. It has the same fingering as the real chanter on the bagpipe, but it's quiet enough to play in an apartment. It costs about what a nice dinner out costs, and so does the tutor book. Most of us learned from the same green tutor book every beginner seems to start with, and so will you.

On the practice chanter you learn the nine notes of the pipe scale, from low G up to high A. That's all the notes there are. Then you learn why it still takes a year: the bagpipe never stops sounding, so you can't separate two notes by stopping, the way you would on a horn. Pipers separate and decorate notes with gracenotes, tiny quick notes played with a flick of a finger, and then with combinations of them called doublings, throws, grips, taorluaths and birls. Learning those cleanly and evenly is the whole first year. When you can play four or five tunes on the practice chanter, in time, with clean gracenotes, Eddie will say you're ready for pipes. Not before.

Beginners' lessons are every Tuesday at 6:45, before band practice, with Eddie Holtzclaw or Ralph Sweeney. There's no charge to learn. The band asks only that you show up every week and practice every day, even fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes every day beats two hours on Sunday.

Year Two: Your First Set of Pipes

The band keeps two loaner sets for new pipers, so you won't need to buy your own right away. When you do, a decent used set runs several hundred dollars and a new set more than a thousand. Don't buy any set without having Eddie or Ralph look at it first. There are a lot of pretty pipes out there that won't play.

The first months on the pipes are mostly about blowing steady. Here are the parts:

Once you can blow steady, you learn to tune the three drones to the chanter and to each other by sliding the drone sections up and down, until all of it sounds like one big instrument instead of a fight. In a band, all fourteen sets have to be tuned to each other. That's what Eddie does for twenty minutes before every performance, and why he looks like that.

The Drum Corps

Sam Perri wants it known that the drummers are the half of the band that keeps time, and that a pipe band without drums is just a lot of men in skirts walking. He's not wrong. Our corps has three kinds of drummers:

• Side drummers play the snare drums, with the heads cranked so tight they crack like rifles. They play the intricate scores that lock in with the pipe tunes. You start on a practice pad and a pair of sticks, learning the rudiments: rolls, flams, drags and paradiddles.
• Tenor drummers play the middle drums with soft, fluffy beaters, and they swing and twirl the sticks in the air as they play. That's called flourishing, and it's harder than it looks. Our two youngest members are tenor drummers.
• The bass drummer is the heartbeat of the whole band. Karl Rogers has played our bass drum since 1981, and when Karl's on, we're on.

Drum lessons are Tuesdays at 6:45 too, with Sam. A practice pad and sticks cost less than a pizza.

What it costs to be in the band

Dues are $10 a month. The band owns a closet full of Black Watch kilts and other uniform pieces, and you borrow from it until you buy your own, which most people do in their second or third year (a good kilt costs a few hundred dollars and lasts a lifetime). The band pays for travel to the games. You pay for your own reeds, and you will pay for a lot of reeds.

Come see us any Tuesday. Bring your patience. Leave your pride at the door, we did.