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Is it useful to learn bagpipes? I guess learning for its own sake is good, but if you want to join a band, guitar or keyboards are going to be a better bet and
by bongodongobob 1y ago
Is it useful to learn bagpipes? I guess learning for its own sake is good, but if you want to join a band, guitar or keyboards are going to be a better bet and learning bagpipes first isn't going to do much for you.
- barrkel 1y agoDo bagpipes explain the mystery of sand performing calculations and taking actions? Do they give you an intuition for connecting how CPUs and memory accesses and cache hierarchies work with high level code, in such a way that you can start to understand why one version of code might be faster or slower than another? If you can't see through field accesses and function calls to memory indirections, anything you might read about how TLBs and caches and branch prediction work doesn't connect to much.
- bongodongobob 1y agoGuess what, almost no one knows how to program in assembly and yet everything is working out pretty good.
- barrkel 1y agoI can say the performance of Windows Explorer lately, compared to how it was in Windows NT, does not impress me.
- spc476 1y agoLearning the accordion didn't hurt Weird Al's career, nor did using the flute hurt Ian Anderson (lead vocalist and flutist of Jethro Tull).
- bongodongobob 1y agoThese are edge cases. Way to miss the point.
- strken 1y agoIf a guitar was an abstraction layer that was implemented by low-level bagpipes then a) that would be awesome and b) guitar players would find their guitar playing to benefit from bagpipe lessons. At the very least they'd be able to understand and maintain their guitar better.
- bongodongobob 1y agoThe connection is that they both play notes. You can play the same songs on both but no one wants to hear bagpipes.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoYou can't play most of the same songs on both. Bagpipes (well, most forms of bagpipe, there are dozens, but unqualified people tend to mean the Scottish "Great Highland Bagpipe") are a diatonic instrument playing a just-intonation scale tuned to not cause discordant notes with their own drones, while guitars are a chromatic instrument fretted to play an equal-tempered intonation. The GHB plays in something rather close to the modern Mixolidian A mode with an augmented 4th, not any of the major or minor keys of modern Western music. The GHB and the guitar are entirely incompatible instruments, unless you're talking about a classical guitar with tied-on gut frets that could be replaced to allow playing the GHB scale.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoI have no idea what any of that means, but I love the deep knowledge that it expresses :-)
- zahlman 1y agoI'll try to simplify: you can't readily adjust the tuning of a bagpipe; it's tuned in a way that would make it sound horribly dissonant against other instruments (for important music-theory reasons); and it doesn't even play all the notes, so you can't play in all the major and minor keys of Western (== European from c. 1580 onward + American) music tradition - you're stuck with scales that only make sense for the genre of music that's specifically written for the instrument.