Hello-
I’ve been attempting The Bonny Pit Lad (Matt Seattle’s arrangement) on a D SSP. What is the best drone tuning? I’ve tried it both smallest drone ‘d’ and the third drone ‘D’ (these are D NSP drones) and ‘d’ and second drone ‘G’ and largest drone ‘G’, which I sometimes tune for some ‘D’ tunes (transposed to ‘G’ for my D SSP chanter, if this makes sense) . I would guess that most Border pipers would tune their drones a and A for this tune?
Looking at clues for the Northumbrian small pipes, In the Clough Family book the notes from Tom Clough indicate C major for this tune, but with no instructions on the drone tuning. So presumably he would have had his drones tuned to G and played the tune with a flattened seventh?? If this is the case then the Clough arrangement would be similar to most Border pipe arrangements??
Hope this makes sense.
Cheers, Stephen

If you play this tune on a D chanter and can tune the lower dones to G it's likely to sound better than using all D's; but on a 'big' pipe your likely to be stuck with A drones, and that wont sound too bad; I've never been wonderfully happy with D tune with A drones, but this one works well enough. BTW, the 'concordance' that Matt prints is well worth a good look; it's a rather different tune type, essentially a 12 bar jig ...

Hi Stephen,

the tune was played with C drones, by Tom Clough, in NSP terms that is a G and a C together with a g -- on most NSP you can't do this unless you have the right tuning beads on the bass D drone and set up the reed for C -- then it sounds really good. Tom Clough does mention C drones for this and another tune in the book -- the C tuning also opens up baroque music by Boismortier and Hotteterre on NSP

ciao
Dave