Scottish Tunes for G Ocarinas (Jack Campin, April 2024)

Scottish traditional music has a lot of different tune types (marches and dances in a wider variety of rhythms than most traditions) and a lot of different scales, using pentatonic and hexatonic modes. I've tried to include as many examples of these as possible so you'll have a feel for what else you might find. Most of these tunes are often played in the Scottish trad scene though there are some forgotten ones as well.

They're all in the usual keys - they have evolved to fit the usual instruments (bagpipes in particular) and you'd need to use these keys if you were to play in a session in Scotland to get the local musicians playing along with you.

Table of contents

Notes of the Bagpipe Chanter

The cornerstone of Scottish music is the Highland Bagpipe, and the instrument's scale has only got nine notes. The drones are in A and the scale is usually thought of as an A Mixolydian scale with an extension to G.

Some bagpipe tunes use notes outside this range, but only a few pipers and instruments can play them.

Pentatonic Scales

Scottish music makes use of this scale to play in a number of different keys by 'gapping' the scale, or omitting notes. For example if you use A as the tonal centre, and omit the G natural, you get an A major tonality.

You can think of the pipe chanter as allowing for three different kinds of pentatonic (5 note) scale - leaving out either F# and C#, G and D, or G and C#:

For each of these you can choose one of four notes listed above to be the keynote, so you have twelve keys to choose from. You get twice as many scales if you leave out only one note, getting hexatonic (6 note) modes.

This way of looking at it is due to the piping scholar Roderick Cannon. If you Improvise in these you'll often find a Scottish tune falls out of your ocarina without trying.

Scales on the G Ocarina

Considering how one would adapt these scales to the ocarina, the G to A range fits on any 10, 11 or 12 hole ocarina in G. You can start by considering the scales above as five heptatonic (7 note) scales using zero to four sharps.

Then by introducing the gaps as discussed, you get three pentatonic scales:

And four hexatonic scales. Each hexatonic scale has two possible key signatures that don't affect the sound (depending on whether you sharpen the missing note) and each pentatonic scale has three possible key signatures. In Scottish music you need to look at the notes you aren't playing to understand the tune.

This collection also makes use of some notes outside of the range strictly possible on a bagpipe, as it gives you a greatly expanded repertoire, and a 'near chromatic' scale showing all notes used in this collection is given below.

Some notes in the scale can be omitted (which means the tune can still be played on the pipes), or sharpened or flattened (with tunes that are usually sung or played on the fiddle), or you can extend the range upwards to high B.

Medley: Slow Air, March, Strathspey and Reel

Scottish tunes are often played in groups. One way to do this is for each tune to be a in a different type and for the tempo to accelerate. All of these tunes have keynote A and most are hexatonic - they leave out the C or C# so you can't tell if they're in the dorian or mixolydian mode.

"I Will Return to Kintail" is the tune of a Gaelic song from the 1600s, originally about a man who was happy to be going home. It later became a lament for a man killed in a battle who was going home in a coffin. Take your pick.

"Marion's Ticket" is in the style of a walking tune from the Hebrides, it's a kind of relaxed march. It came to me when I was improvising on an electronic bagpipe chanter while waiting at the railway station in Kolin, in the Czech Republic, looking out at an endless hellscape of rusted steel and broken glass. I wrote it down in the blank area on my wife's railway ticket.

"Devil in the Kitchen" is a 19th century schottische, a quick couple dance, in the 7-note pipe scale.

"Lexie MacAskill" is a stomping reel that is often played with hypnotic repeats as a dancefloor anthem.

2/4 Marches

These are among the most played tunes on the pipes. "Highland Laddie" is a version from the 19th century of an 18th century song tune. It's often the first tune learners play and is in B minor with the C omitted.

"Walter Douglas MBE" is an early 20th century by Donald Macleod, whose five big tune collections are used by most Highland pipers. It's a hexatonic tune like the medley above, strong and dramatic.

"The Chow Man" was written at a British Army camp in China in the 1920s and dedicated to the regiment's cook. It's in D major but pentatonic - it leaves out both the G's and the C. It's intended to sound Chinese as well as Scottish.

"The Bens of Jura" is from the 1880s, the first version of a tune that got four different names, ending up as the song "The Road to the Isles". Mixolydian, using all the notes on the chanter.

"The 79ths Farewell to Gibraltar" is one of the first march tunes written for the British Army, during the Crimean War. The troops had been stuck at Gibraltar for weeks in a windless heatwave and were very glad they were leaving. It's hexatonic, there are no G's in it.

"Donald Blue" is a simple tunes in the Dorian mode.

"Munlochy Bridge" is a Highland pipes version of a Lowland song from Edinburgh, "Leith Wynd" - originally a lament by woman whose lover has been executed with his body hanging on the gibbet. It's hexatonic with no C's, but the keynote is (unusually) E - it's ambiguous between dorian and minor.

"Greenwoodside" is a cheery pipe march adaptation of a Scottish version of the English song "The Cruel Mother", about a woman who murders her newborn babies and meets their reincarnations or ghosts, and they tell her she's going to hell. It's hexatonic with no G's, ambiguous between B minor and B dorian.

"Campbell's Farewell to Redcastle" is a 19th century tune relating to a pipers' competition in north-east Scotland - it became very popular under different titles in America and was used for the Scottish song "The Hills o Gallowa". it's mixolydian, using all the notes on the chanter.

"Corriechoille's Farewell to the Northern Meeting" is from the same area and time - "Corriechoille" was a landowner who liked to boast that he was the second biggest cattle farmer in Europe, after Esterhazy in Hungary. It's pentatonic in D with the C and the G's missing.

"The Inverness Gathering" is a 19th century pipe tune with a probably bogus backstory connecting it to the Battle of Culloden. There are many versions of it.

3/4 Marches

These are often called "retreat marches" - not for retreating from a battle but for going back to barracks at the end of the day. They go at a relaxed pace.

"Dark Lowers the Night" is a version of an 18th century Lowland song fragment about a man who is about to kill himself for sorrow after his wife or lover died. I've written it in an unusual way to save space - each part has the same second half, the middle line.

"Lochanside", from the early 20th century, is a popular tune on every kind of Scottish folk instrument and has a song text by Jim Malcolm.

"The Kilworth Hills" is the first tune G.S. Maclennan composed - it's an elaboration of the (horribly misogynistic) Russian song "Stenka Razin", which he heard sailors from a Russian ship singing in 1899 in Leith.

"The Green Hills of Tyrol" was adapted for the pipes by Peter Macleod in 1854 from a Tyrolean folksong used as an aria in Rossini's "William Tell".

9/8 Marches

These are another kind of retreat march.

"The Battle of the Somme" was written in hospital by a piper dying of his wounds in that battle - but it's not a lament, just a normal moderate-paced march, often used by ceilidh bands for dances like the Gay Gordons. William Laurie just lived long enough to see his tune become a popular hit before he died. Heptatonic, D major.

"The Hills of Dargai" was originally "The Dagshai Hills", after an army base in the Himalayas (my wife's grandmother was born there). Dargai is 1000 miles west of there in Afghanistan: the location of a battle in 1895 where the piper made himself a national hero by continuing to play after getting badly wounded. The new name was chosen for purely commercial reasons. I've used a compressed layout for this - each first half is mixed with each second half. Heptatonic mixolydian but the low G is missing.

This and the above tune are often played together in this order.

Reels

Reels are probably the commonest kind of dance tune in Scotland. And elsewhere - a lot of Irish reels started out as Scottish ones.

"The Bob of Fettercairn" is a very unusual tune - it's in the Lydian mode, meaning its keynote is G - probably the only tune in Scottish tradition like that. It has bawdy words from 18th century Edinburgh (used as a worksong by washerwomen bashing clothes on rocks in the river) as "Had I the wyte", published by Burns, and was given a Jacobite Gaelic text as "Good wife admit the wanderer".

"Bratach Bana" is a militaristic rallying song; hexatonic in D, with no C's.

"Brenda Stubbert's Reel" is a much-played tune by the Cape Breton fiddler Jerry Holland - not a standard pipe tune (though it can be played on the pipes if you have the technique), it uses natural C's instead of the C#'s of the chanter, %and it's hexatonic with no F's so it could be A dorian or A minor.

"Walking on the Moon" is by Addie Harper from Wick (in northern Scotland, beyond the Highlands) - the B sharp upbeat is not always played but it makes a good effect.

"The Ale is Dear" is a 19th century tune, with no G's so it's ambiguous between B dorian and B minor.

"The Black Mull" is an 18th century reel, equally often played on pipes or fiddle. Nobody knows if it's about a tobacco mull or a textile mill. It's also known as the "Oyster Wives Rant", a dance of the fisherwomen of Edinburgh before the oyster beds of the Forth were dredged out of existence by a private monopolist in the late 18th century.

"The Drunken Piper" is a 19th century pipe tune, often used for the dance "The Reel of the 51st Division", invented by Scottish prisoners of war in Normandy in 1941.

"Miss Forbes's Farewell to Banff" is a tune from the late 18th century by Isaac Cooper, multi-instrumentalist and music teacher and the town bellringer of Glasgow. Unusually in this selection, it's in G.

Medley of Four Reels

These are often played together as a set / medley.

"Mrs Macleod" dates from the 1780s, but it's a reel-time version of a Gaelic satirical song of 100 years before that became a jig, "The Campbells are Coming". (There is a 19th century Irish version that turns her into Miss Macleod, reverses the part order and plays her a tone flat. Not impressed).

"The Fairy Dance" is a fiddle tune from around 1800 by Nathaniel Gow - this goes up to the high B so it doesn't fit the pipe chanter, but it's no problem on an ocarina.

"The High Road to Linton" is an 18th century tune that was originally half as long. It starts out in A mixolydian, then the second part begins in a hexatonic scale and finally adds G#'s to make in in A major. The repeated high A's in the third part are often played as soloed notes with all the backing instruments dropping out.

"The Deil Amang the Tailors" is a fiddle tune played worldwide - on the fiddle it often drops below the ocarina's low G, so I've "folded" the ending into the higher octave.

Strathspey and Reel Sets

It's common in Scottish traditional music to play strathspeys and reels successively - this used to be because some dances used tunes to fit, though they aren't often danced any more.

I learned these two tunes, "The Highlands of Scotland" and "Ryan's Rant" that way, in a class on Scottish music for the cello. They're both from the late 19th century.

Shetland Reels

Most Shetland tunes are conceived for the fiddle and range too low for the G ocarina. An exception is "Da Merry Boys o Greenland" (which resembles Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" a bit too much to be coincidence).

Others are "Sleep Soond i da Mornin" and "Up and Doon da Harbour" (which has the C's sharpened on falling phrases and natural on rising ones, the opposite of the normal Western harmonic minor).

6/8 Marches

These are slower than jigs though they sometimes get confused with them. Try actually marching to them and you'll get the tempo. They caught on the in America with Sousa's marches like "The Liberty Bell" (the Monty Python theme). "The Midlothian Amateur Pipe Band" (in D major) is from the 1880s, "Donald Maclean of Lewis" (pentatonic on A) is from the 1930s.

Waltzes

"The Four Marys" is classed as a waltz in Kerr's "Merry Melodies" of the 1880s - it's the tune for the ballad "Mary Hamilton".

"The Stronsay Waltz" is a fiddle tune from Orkney but it's only slightly adapted from a 6/8 pipe march, "The Scottish Horse" - it's in A mixolydian. Many traditional Scottish waltzes are based on Gaelic song tunes.

"The Braes of Lochiel" is a Gaelic song, minor pentatonic with no C's or F's.

"Leaving Lismore" is sort of mixolydian, it doesn't make much difference whether the G's are omitted, natural, sharp or a quarter tone in between.

Slow Tunes

"The Bonny Lass of Fyvie" is a song from the north-east of Scotland; D major.

"Sunset on the Somme" is a bleak lament written by G.S. MacLennan when looking out at the battlefield after its bloodiest first day. I've included all the original ornamentation - this will not work on an ocarina but gives you an idea of which notes get some sort of expressive attack.

"The Mist-Covered Mountains" (in B minor) is an adaptation of an English song tune "Johnny's Too Long at the Fair", used for a Gaelic song around 1880; it is often used as a funeral march though there's nothing sad about the Gaelic words.

"The Burning of Crieff", by Nigel Gatherer (who lives in % Crieff himself) commemorates the destruction of the town by the Jacobite army in the 1715 uprising. It's A mixolydian using the whole chanter scale.

"Fy gar Rub her o'er with Straw" is an 18th century song - it's in melodic minor, the F's are only sharpened on rising phrases.

"Fingal's Cave" is an 18th century fiddle tune first published by the Gow family; it's in the Dorian mode.

"Lindisfarne" was written by the Border piper Matt Seattle: it was heard by a much wider audience when the Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell had her recording of it used by McDonalds for a UK-wide advertising campaign. Matt himself rearranges the part order in several different ways and isn't bothered if other people do it their own way.

Strathspeys/Schottisches

These tunes all use the short-long "Scotch snap" rhythmic figure. Schottisches are a quick couple dance like a polka, strathspeys are formation dances and often quite complicated in both movements and footwork.

"Cutting Bracken" is based on a Gaelic song about the drudgery of agricultural work; pentatonic on A with no C's or F's.

"Orange and Blue" is also known by its Gaelic title "Brochan Lom", a song complaining about thin porridge.

"Katie Bairdie" is a Lowland song first written down in the early 1600s which has acquired several sets of obscene words over the centuries, like "Kafoozalum" (The Harlot of Jerusalem). It's in an irregular mode, D major with the B missing; basically it only uses the upper half of the chanter scale.

"Cadgers of the Canongate" is an 18th century fiddle tune referring to the men who carried goods on their backs in the centre of Edinburgh - it's in G major but with the C missing. It fits the chanter scale but no pipe tune does that, the dissonance against the drones would be gruesome.

Hornpipes

These are not a common dance type in Scottish music, and most are meant for the fiddle, with a range too wide for the ocarina. "The Falls of Clyde" is a fiddle tune but it fits. The low G sharp is unavoidable.

Bagpipe Hornpipes

These tunes were made to fit solo Highland dances but are also used as marches.

"Old Toasty" is in A major but leaves out the D's and the low G; this means you can play it one tone lower, in G major, and still be in the chanter scale. (I used to play with an old moothie player who liked to do it both ways in succession in a pub).

"The Wee Man from Skye" has no C's - ambiguous between A dorian and A mixolydian.

"The Black Bear" is often used as a fast march back to barracks at the end of the day.

6/8 Jigs

These are about as common as marches and reels in Scottish tradition. If you're looking for jigs to play for a dance, Irish jigs usually don't fit any single chamber ocarina but a lot of Scottish ones do; many were composed for the pipes or are close to pipe music in the notes they need.

"Calliope House" was written by the Edinburgh fiddler Dave Richardson, and he intended it to be in E major. It works well like that on a G ocarina; fiddlers sometimes find it easier in D and you'll hear it both ways. It's almost hexatonic, the A.s aren't used much.

People often follow it with "The Stool of Repentance", in A major, which gives a V-I movement that helps keep the impetus of a medley.

"Drummond Castle" is a jig version of the strathspey "Cutting Bracken", but it's hexatonic with a C natural instead of a gap. They go well together.

"The House of Gray" fills the F gap, it's A dorian.

"John Bain's Sister's Wedding" is the tune of an old Gaelic song; it flattens the F to get A minor.

"Haud Awa Hame" is a very unusual tune in the Phrygian mode of F#.

"Bide Ye Yet" is in a commoner scale - the second is missing so it's ambiguous between E minor and E phrygian. It's from an 18th century song.

9/8 Jigs

This kind of tune was common to Scotland and northern England around 1700, often played by Border pipers. They tend to have many parts, in variation forms that were probably written-down improvisations.

"Brose and Butter" (in the Dorian mode) is one of the oldest of these, probably from Northumbria.

"Donald Willie and his Dog" is more recent tune, composed by a Highland piper It has a hypnotic effect when played over and over again by a large group.

3/2 Hornpipes

These tunes are not played often in Scotland now, but they were popular in both England and Scotland in the early 1700s.

"Wee Totum Fogg" was later used by Burns for a song.

"The Baggpipe Tune" is from a manuscript compiled by the Scott family in Dalkeith around 1675 - it seems to be the oldest written copy of a bagpipe tune (I think I was the first to notice it).

"Go to Berwick Johnnie" is found in both Scotland and Northumbria - it isn't clear which side of the border he was going to Berwick from. This version is for the Northumbrian pipes and in their usual key, G. It might be more effective on the G ocarina if you play it a tone higher, in A.

American Tunes that Caught On in Scotland

The best selling Scottish tune collection of all time is "Kerr's Merry Melodies", first printed in the 1880s. Kerr grabbed every tune that he could find, not just Scottish ones.

"Hell on the Wabash" is an American fife band tune with strange syncopations.

"Snowden's Jig" was a minstrel tune rediscovered in Kerr's books and brought back home by the Carolina Chocolate drops: Rhiannon Giddens plays it as a dreamy slow reel.

"Amazing Grace" is a tune every tourist expects pipers to play. It's an American hymn tune from the shape note tradition with no known composer and no known link to Scotland until a Scottish pipe band had a massive hit with it in the 1970s. My guess is it originated in West Africa, it suits some styles of African singing very well. It's pentatonic on D, the C and G are missing.

Tunes with high B

A lot of pipe-like tunes were composed on the fiddle. The top two strings of the fiddle in first position cover the range from A to high B - you need to use the D string to get the low G (which makes the idioms conflict in ergonomics) and you get one note higher.

"Lager Beer" is a strathspey from Kerr's collection in the Dorian mode of B which uses the high B but not the low G.

"Miss Drummond of Perth" (A dorian with no F's) and "The Duke of Perth" (all the way from low G to high B) are both from the middle of the 18th century and dedicated to the same family. Some old types of bagpipe could get that high B.

"Soor Plums of Galashiels" was probab;y for the Border pipes. It marks a battle where the invading English soldiers had eaten a lot of plums from a local orchard before the fight, and they fell undigested out of their stomachs when they were disembowelled.

"The Hen's March to the Midden" started out as the Triumphal March in "Harlequin Fortunatus", an unfinished opera for the London stage by the Scottish composer James Oswald. Nathaniel Gow arranged it for the piano around 1800 (with added barnyard noises like turkeys gobbling in the bass) and it got to Shetland sometime in the 20th century; thsi version is from the Shetland fiddler Tom Anderson. I add masses of ornamentation which I haven't tried to write down.

Tune Folding

Some Scottish fiddle tunes have whole phrases shifted by an octave for dramatic effect - usually downwards growling on the G string.

"King George IV" is a strathspey written for the King's visit to Edinburgh in 1822, played on a very big fiddle band at a public event. It isn't something a village fiddler thought up in his kitchen. It's still effective if you shift the low section and final phrase up by an octave to get it into the ocarina's range.

"The King's Reel" is the same tune played at twice the bpm in a simpler rhythm. I've included a fiddle version and a folded one made for the Border pipes by Hamish Moore.

"The Bluebell Polka" is a tune from the 1880s, a huge hit for Jimmy Shand in the 1950s. It almost fits a 10-hole in G, and the low F sharps can be moved up to A without losing the effect. If you have an 11-hole they might work as originally written.

Odd Stuff

"The Seal Fisher's Song" is a kind of slow jig, used as a call to attract seals by hunters in the 18th century. It has a spectacular effect if you play echoes of the tune against itself in a free canon.

"Cullen Bay" is a pipe march - sounds perfectly normal except that it's in 5/4.

"A Yowe Cam To Wir Door Yarmin" is a Shetland fiddle tune; the F is a quartertone, in between F and F#, maybe from Scandinavian influence. I've taken the first three bars up an octave from the way fiddlers play it.

"The Gael" is by the singer/songwriter/fiddler Dougie Maclean and was used in the film "The Last of the Mohicans" - it's in jig tempo but isn't a jig, as it just plays straight through with no break into sections.

Tunes in Multiple Keys

The gapped mode system of Scottish music makes it feasible to change key within the range of the chanter scale.

"The Boy's Lament for his Dragon" was originally a 19th century pipe march. "The 72nd's Farewell to Aberdeen"; the C naturals (taking it briefly into A minor or G) were added by the bandleader Jimmy Shand around 1950. (A dragon is a kind of kite, it blew away and the boy lost it).

"The Jig of Slurs" is a very popular tune with the keynote is D in the first half and E in the second.

"The Sheepwife" is a showpiece, a kind of Escher tune where it feels like the key is continually moving upwards because of the way the gapped scales are manipulated.

Busker Tunes

There are tunes tourists expect Scottish trad musicians to play. You will hear them in the street in any city centre.

"Highland Cathedral" was written by two German musicians - it sounds rather like what Brahms might have written if he'd played the bagpipes. I like it but not everybody does.

"Caledonia", by the singer/fiddler/songwriter Dougie Maclean, has gone anthemic. I don't get why.

"Scotland the Brave" is a fiddle tune from the 1880s (originally "Brave Scotland"), adapted for the pipes around WW1, and given its usual words by Cliff Hanley in 1949, using every cliche he could think of - only to find that people took it seriously and he made a fortune on the royalties. This version is close to the fiddle one, in the bagpipe-hostile key of G and going above the chanter range.

"Flower of Scotland", by the Corries, is Scotland's football anthem. Pipers hate it because of that C natural. It's probably derived from the "Chorus of Hebrew Slaves" in Verdi's opera "Nabucco".