ePipes Drones app for iPhone and iPad
ePipes Drones is a tunable, authentic sounding set of Scottish Highland, Border Pipes, and Smallpipes drones.
This app is for musicians who are learning to play the Scottish bagpipes and want high-quality sets of tunable drones to play along with on their practice chanters.
The sounds are provided by ePipes.co.uk in Glasgow, Scotland, from extremely high-fidelity studio recordings of three very fine instruments.
Touch the ePipes logo to switch the drones on and off.
Select the drone type using the drone selector. Available drone types are Great Highland, Border, and Smallpipes.
Set the volume using the Drone Volume slider.
The pitch may be transposed in semitone increments +/- one octave in using the Tranpose slider.
Additionally, the Tuning slider may be used to fine-tune the drone +/- 50 cents in one-cent increments
The Reverb slider sets how much reverb effect is added to the sound.
All settings are saved when the app exits and restored the next time it is run.
MIDI Chanter Test Features:
Test your MIDI Chanter by setting the MIDI channels for the chanter and drones channels. Any MIDI Note-On message note numbers received on those channels will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. This value can be used to determine the MIDI offset value from 67 for the chanter in my other MIDI-enabled apps that default to the Fagerstrom Technopipes standard of the bottom note being MIDI note 67 (G3) as a zero offset.
Pros and cons of ePipes Drones app for iPhone and iPad
ePipes Drones app good for
Would like to see a "double tap" feature on the keys as an update.
Im very impressed with Mr. Eskins work. The app is well sampled, and plays very smoothly--and more important, its fun.
I gave it only four stars because currently it lacks the ability to tune the pipe. Its very well in tune with itself, but if you want to play along to music in your library, an ability advertized in the app description, even highland pipe music, you need to be able to tune your e-pipe to match.
Overall, excellent app. Keep up the good work, sir!
Great app with high quality sound, easy to play - with fast, friendly support! hard to stop playing once you start! looking forward to update with keyboard in G - what a blast!!
MH
Good app for playing with Scottish highland sounds, no crashes or bugs. New keyboard layout is exactly as expected from Scottish notation. Playing with easy mode off is also quite fun, since you can play a nice minor third interval (not available on real pipes - fun to have a different scale to play with). Overall really fun app to help work out real melodies with a good highland pipe sound. Developer was very receptive and quick to improve this app, keep these apps coming Micheal.
Great app..but It would be even more great if there was a higher octave. Def.worth the money
Some bad moments
When playing the chanter by itself... you need to push twice on the drone to stop everything...