Contents of this page
1) About pipetunes.ca
2) Download tools
3) Legal issues
4) Settings
5) Pointing
6) 1st and 2nd endings
7) The Recordings
8) Levels of Difficulty
9) Pricing
10) Composers
11) Acknowledgements
12) Terms and Conditions, refunds and privacy

About pipetunes.ca
This website has been a labour of love for me since I started working on it in the fall of 2005. It had struck me for some years that pipers were lagging behind much of the musical world in terms of being able legally to acquire individual tunes in sheet-music form.

My hope is that this site will support itself financially in such a way as to allow me over time to expand the number of tunes and composers, the number of settings of individual tunes, the type of music and the nature of the recordings offered.

I have typeset all of the tunes myself using a wonderful piece of software called Sibelius. This was a tremendous education in music for me. I have recorded the majority of the MP3 files myself. Far from being onerous (well, maybe a bit) it gave me even more reasons than I already have to play regularly and maintain my playing standard.

I offer my thanks to the many composers who jumped on board with me when this was just an idea. I don't know if they will make any money, but I do know that if our clientele circumvents the 'honour system' of this site by emailing the tune files to all their friends it will not survive and we'll all be back to buying a $35 book of music for the two good tunes it might contain.


Download tools
All of the sheet music on this site is in the form of a pdf file. You will need Adobe Acrobat reader to open it. To download Adobe Acrobat for free, click here: Adobe Acrobat.

All of the recorded downloads on this site are in the form of an MP3 file. You will need an MP3 player like Windows Media Player (you probably already have this as it comes with Windows) or RealPlayer. To download RealPlayer for free, click here: RealPlayer

Legal issues
The majority of tunes in this online collection are public domain. Many others are copyrighted to composers or arrangers who are still alive, or to the estates of those who have passed on. These composers/arrangers are receiving royalties on the sales of their music that are more generous than those of any other publisher.

In some cases, tunes on this site may not be strictly public domain; however, after making every effort to contact the composers or the composers' families I have concluded that these composers are deceased and there are no custodians of their music to whom copyright has been passed. 

However, sales of all pieces of music are being tracked, and if a relative or copyright holder of a deceased composer comes forward and can offer proof that they are indeed active custodians of the composer's music, I will either pay royalties due, remove the music from the site, or both.

Biographical material presented on this site is copyright, but may be used for personal or non-profit educational purposes with credit being given to pipetunes.ca and to the original provider of the information or photo, if cited.


Settings
One of the great benefits of pipetunes.ca is to be found in the settings (i.e. versions) of the tunes. Some of the great books of pipe music contain settings that are antiquated, unwisely gracenoted, or are pointed in ways that may simply reflect one piper's idiosyncracies 75 years ago.

I have paid acute attention to gracenoting and pointing in all of these tunes. I have used published settings as a guideline, making carefully considered alterations according to modern gracenoting or pointing practices. Frequently I have combined the best characteristics of more than one setting to arrive at a setting that reflects current gracenoting and pointing styles while remaining true to the tradition of the tune. 

In many cases, a pipetunes.ca setting may not be the same setting I play, because my personal settings reflect my personal idiosyncracies.

In some cases – examples are the tunes of Donald MacLeod and John Wilson, Edinburgh – I have agreed to publish the tunes exactly as they originally appeared in print in the composers' published books or manuscripts. Sometimes this entailed using pointing or gracenoting styles that don't reflect how the tunes are played today. However, I have promised the estates involved to be true to the composers' original intentions, and I think in these cases that's a good thing.

Pointing
Related to settings is the issue of how pointed a tune should be played, or whether it should be pointed at all. There is more than one way to play a pipe tune, and particularly in the reel and hornpipe idioms one piper might choose to point a tune that is written round, or round a tune that is written with lots of dots and cuts. It can be confusing to less experienced pipers to find music to a tune they heard and liked only to see that it's not written the way they heard it. So, welcome to traditional music, where we are frequently heard to say, "The music is just a guide."

1st and 2nd endings
Less experienced pipers are sometimes confused by the brackets above lines of music that say things like "1 of 2" or "2 of 2" or "2 of 4." Sometimes they may just say "1" or "2." These are commonly known as second endings, and they are a way of saying, for example, that line 2 of the first part is also line 2 of the second time through the second part.

If you see a bracket over the second line of the first part of a march, and at the start of the bracket it says "2 of 2," that is an abbreviated way of saying, "We're going to use this particularly lovely 2nd line of the first part again later in the tune. Play it again as line 2 of the second time through part 2."  When you arrive at part 2, you'll see a bracket over the 2nd line of that part that says "1 of 2." Play that line the first time through the part, and the bracketed line from the first part when you play the second time through the 2nd part. We do this so that we can write out a 10-line tune in just 8 lines, or a 5-line tune in just 4.

While this system may look confusing at first, it's not all that hard. Just remember that the first number refers to the first or second time through the part, and the second number refers to the actual part.

If this is still unclear, the MP3 recording will set you straight.


The Recordings
I have tried to include MP3 demonstrations of as many tunes as I possibly could. I have made most of them myself, but I would like to thank the many composer/arrangers who agreed to provide recordings of themselves playing their own tunes. They are compensated with each download of the file.

While I asked no more than that they record the tunes on practice chanter, some have decided to use pipes or small pipes. No matter how they are done, these recordings are meant to be demonstrations of the tunes only. They are not 'performances,' and I have not been concerned about squeaks, breathing noises, foot-tapping or breaks for breath. These MP3s are meant give you an idea how the tunes can be played.

All of the public domain tunes, and many of the copyright pieces, have been recorded by myself. At the beginning of the project I used a practice chanter. Later, when I grew tired of figuring out where to take breaths, I stuck the practice chanter into a pipe bag. Later still, when I grew tired of blowing altogether, I began using a Deger electronic chanter, and have continued in this direction because of ease of use and recording and the quite pleasant sound it makes.

While I have tried to play the tunes to tempo where possible, many of them are slightly slower that I would play them in performance. This is largely because not all of the hundreds of tunes on the site are in my personal repertoire! Many I haven't played for years, and many more I recorded only a few minutes after sight-reading them for the first time. I haven't been too concerned about slower tempos because, again, these are demonstration recordings, not performanances.

Levels of Difficulty
All tunes here will have a "Level of Difficulty" assigned to them. These levels are not absolute; they are relative to the time signatures they are describing. If this was an absolute list, then every slow air would be listed as "easy" and every hornpipe as "very difficult."

So, if a 4-parted hornpipe is described as "easy" this does not mean it will be easy like a slow air. It means that, as hornpipes go, this is an easy hornpipe. But if you've never been able to play hornpipes, it will still be a difficult tune for you.


Pricing
Prices of tunes are calculated roughly by the number of lines of music in the tune; however, this is a starting point, not a hard and fast rule. For example, 2-part strathspeys are generally 4-line tunes. However, when the music was set this way the lines were crowded and hard to read, so the 4-bar lines were split into 2-bar lines, doubling the number of lines but making the tunes much easier to follow. It seemed only fair to retain the 4-line price for these tunes.

The mimimum price for any tune or recording is 4 credits. Credits range in price according to how many you buy at once.

Copyright tunes are priced higher than public domain ('trad') tunes because a royalty is being paid to the composer/arranger or their estate.

Tunes of greater complexity, such as competition marches and strathspeys, are assessed an additional surcharge due to the increased time and effort required to typeset and record them.


Composers
I make every effort to maintain accurate information in the composers' biographies. Reliable information on the great composers of the past can be hard to come by. I have made liberal and legal use of back issues of every piping magazine I could get my hands on and have credited those publications accordingly. The facts those magazines have set forth are public domain, but the publications deserve credit for making them available. 

I am particularly indebted to Dr. William Donaldson of Aberdeen University, who has been most generous with the fruits of his own painstaking research over the years. This is a man who doesn't trust what he reads about a composers' date of birth; he goes and finds the birth certificate. He has offered information I would otherwise not have found, and has corrected erroneous information that all too often gets passed from one piping publication to another.

I hope this site will become a public repository for biographical information and photos on composers and pipers in general. The piping world is full of people who have access to information on pipers' lives that needs to be recorded before it disappears forever. New information or photos on old or current composers is much appreciated, and contributions will be acknowledged on the site. Feel free to email me with information at any time or to correct any mistakes I may have made.


Acknowledgements
While the idea for this website has percolated in my mind for some years, it started to take shape only after I began to exchange ideas and make plans with Stuart Lowe, a long-time friend and former piping student. Ultimately, Stuart and I decided not to partner in the site, but I'm grateful for his help and the ideas we worked through over some months at the start of this project.

Janette Montague came on board to help with typesetting at a time when my life was becoming spread too thinly for me to keep up. Her knowledge of the Sibelius software, her top-notch musical training and taste, her care with the scores, and her willingness to run new ideas past me have been a godsend. Her brilliant harmonies and some of her original tunes are also now an important part of the catalogue.

Dr. William Donaldson has been instrumental not only in helping with biographical information but in setting me straight on the actual composers of some 'traditional' tunes. His ongoing and generous advice on a wide range of topics related to this site has been absolutely invaluable. While it has been my decision to set forth the piobaireachd collection as it will soon appear, my impetus to do so germinated in my reading and re-reading of Dr. Donaldson's seminal work The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society: 1750-1950. Without this book, our fruitful email discussions, and his advice on piobaireachd sources and settings, I would not have had the wherewithall to pull together the piobaireachd settings that will soon appear on this site.

For much of the biographical information contained here I am indebted to present and past editors of piping magazines, in particular The Piping Times, The Piper and Drummer (now pipes|drums), Piping Today, The International Piper, The Piper and Dancer Bulletin, The North American Scotsman and The EUSPBA Voice. As mentioned above, the facts these publications contain are public domain, so the biographical information provided here is offered free of charge and sources have been cited wherever they are known.

Professor Ross Anderson of the University of Cambridge provided invaluable help around the very difficult issue of copyright of pipe tunes. I approached him one day with an email out of the blue and he generously answered my every question.

Pipers Doug Walton and Peter Walen both offered to test the site before it went public and their feedback meant a great deal to the site and to me personally. Doug in particular spent countless hours downloading files for me to make sure they work.

My gratitude also goes out to Kris Pazek and Darlene Snow of Fusion Studios Inc. in Newmarket, Ontario for their creativity, enthusiasm, patience and humour in creating a new type of website from my pencilled scribblings and hopeful smile.

Terms and Conditions, Refunds and Privacy
The pipetunes.ca shopping cart allows you to use your Visa or Mastercard credit card to purchase 'credits' which can then be used to pay for computer downloads of pipe music as pdf files, and recordings as MP3 files. Payment is made using a secure server and you will receive an automatic email confirmation of your purchase when it is completed. Staff at pipetunes.ca do not actually receive or see your credit card number. All charges to credit cards are made in Canadian funds. If you live outside of Canada, your credit card will convert the amount to your country's currency and your statement will show that amount.

None of the personal information you provide as you purchase credits on this site will be provided to any third party or made public in any way without your permission. If you have any concerns about privacy of your information or charges to your credit card, please email pipetunes.ca.

In order to purchase credits you must have a login account on pipetunes.ca For security reasons, any time you purchase credits you will be required to enter all of your credit card information again, as this information is not retained. It is your responsibility to keep your login and password information secret.

If you are not satisfied with the product you have received here pipetunes.ca will do all we can to make things right or we will issue a refund for unsatisfactory downloads and/or credits remaining on the system. If you have purchased a larger number of credits at a discount, your refunded amount will be determined by the cost of the credits used at the non-discounted rate.

If you have any comments or questions on the above points, or the settings, tunes or composers in this collection, or want to point out any errors, please email pipetunes.ca.