Why do the Bagpipes in the Wavetable Sound Strange?
The wavetable is created by digitally sampling a single note from an instrument. When other notes are played, the wavetable scales the sampled note up or down. The bagpipe is unlike other musical instruments in that it produces several notes simultaneously. The Great Highland Bagpipe of Scotland has a chanter from which the melody is played, two tenor drones which sounds a constant tone one octave below low-A on the chanter, and a single bass drone which sounds a constant tone two octaves below low-A. If you sample a single note from a bagpipe you will sample the chanter and the drones. When you scale that note up or down you will also be scaling the drones up or down, which is not correct! That is why bagpipe music on the wavetable sounds strange. At ChipChat, Marty, Scott, Tyge, Dean, and Clifford are all brothers who play the bagpipes. We alerted Yamaha, the company that originally did the wavetable about this problem and a suggested fix. It is documented in the wavetable technical
