In fact, the even tempered scale hasn't completely taken over. The
uilleann pipes are usually tuned against the drones, and I imagine that is
also true of the highland pipes and other instruments like the vielle
which have drones. This means
that when voicing the instrument, makers adjust the pitch of the note
on the chanter to make them blend well with the drones. (More exactly,
they adjust the drone pitch until it sounds right with the given note on
the chanter. The amount the drone had to go up is the amount the chanter
will have to come down.)
This effectively means that they are in some kind of just tuning:
the ratio of the frequency of each note to the drone frequency is a simple
fraction with fairly low denominator. (Or quite close---the overtones
have quite a bit to do with the blend, and they're almost never exactly in
harmonic ratios with the fundamental, so there's probably a small tuning
adjustment for that.) It's close to the even tempered scale for the fifth
and third, not so close with the second, for instance. (15-17 cents
difference, as I remember.(?)) With this kind of tuning, even the interval
D-E sounds reasonable. (Try that on a piano.) It's common to play an E
minor tune over a D drone, and pipers love to play with the C note against
the D drone.
After playing the pipes for a number of years, I find that the
piano, played solo or with an orchestra, sounds correct, but, when I hear
it played along with a set of pipes, it sounds very much in-your-face and
definitely off. Guitars are much better, since their attack isn't quite
so brash. (Of course, the pianist mistakenly thinks that the pipes are
off...:-)
Cheers,
John Walsh
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