A Little Bit of Everything
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Gordon Duncan: Just for Gordon
Gordon Duncan reshaped what the Highland pipes could sound like. "Just for Gordon" is a posthumous archive of competition sets, BBC sessions, and concert recordings that lets you hear why a generation of pipers still cite him as the line between before and after.
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Fifteen Minutes at Nine
Every morning at nine o'clock, wherever the Queen was in residence, a piper in Highland dress played for exactly fifteen minutes beneath her window. A rare peek at a ritual most pipers know exists but almost none have witnessed.
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When the Pipers Play
A feature-length documentary about the Great Highland bagpipe: its wars, its funerals, and its awkward second life as a global instrument learned in Tokyo and Toronto. A quarter-century old, and still the film to hand a non-piper who asks why the pipes matter.
Free Lessons, Real Costs
Most pipe bands offer beginner lessons free, not as charity but as a recruitment pipeline. So why do so many beginners vanish before they can march? An r/bagpipes thread surfaces an uncomfortable pattern: free lessons correlate with poor retention, and even $2 a week changes the math.
The Bagpipes Were Never Banned
You have heard the story: after Culloden, the British banned the bagpipes as instruments of war. It is a good line, repeated on plaques, tour buses, and in a particular scene of a Mel Gibson film. It is also, as a matter of statutory fact, not quite true.
Why We Call Them Warpipes
The Great Highland Bagpipe is called a warpipe because for four centuries these instruments went to war. Pipers led troops at Loos, the Somme, and Sword Beach. The men who carried the pipes forward, and the men on the other side who heard them coming, both earned the name.
What does the data say about who actually wins the World Pipe Band Championships
In nearly eighty years of the World Pipe Band Championships, only 14 bands have ever won Grade 1. Five dynasties account for most of them. The first piece in the new Surveys & Data thread digs into who actually wins, with charts of the band leaderboard and the country breakdown.