As fans of Brazil and England have discovered at this month’s World Cup, you can’t drown out 10,000 vuvuzelas even with samba drums or a brass band. It’s enough to make you wish Scotland had qualified: we’d stake our house on a couple of ginger-wigged Tartan Army stalwarts to give those pesky plastic horns an aural shoeing with some bagpipe melodies.
Ah well. There’s some good news for bagpipe fans, though: developer Michael Eskin has released an iPad app that lets you play the Scottish Highland Bagpipes, complete with drone and chanter sounds based on “incredibly high-quality per-note studio recordings of some of the finest instruments available”.
This isn’t a novelty app like the many vuvuzela apps on the App Store: Eskin’s app uses all the proper fingering, although thankfully there are charts to help novices find their way around the virtual pipes. The app also lets you play along to songs in your iPad’s music library – Eskin recommends using the feature to play over recordings of drums, although it would arguably be just as entertaining over, say, Scooch.
Bagpipes – Scottish Highland Bagpipes costs £2.99 on the App Store, and there are also versions available for the Scottish Smallpipes and Scottish Border Pipes.
Leave a Reply