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ViperPiper's Bagpipe Tunes
Welcome
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Welcome to Viper Piper's Bagpipe Tunes!
You can use this site to view sheet music, download tune files, listen to midi files of tunes, upload your own compositions, request tunes from other users, and generally chat about anything bagpipe related. Click Here for general information on the site and how to use it, or click on the Forum link at the top to dive right in.
My vision for this site is for it to be a community effort - pipers helping other pipers. I would like the site to be the biggest and best repository of pipe tunes on the internet. There are lots of ways you can get involved - check this HOW TO article in the information forum for details.
We take a responsible approach to copyright. It would be so easy to make thousands of copyright tunes available from this site, but we feel that this would be unfair to the composers who try to make a living from selling their work. We do not publish copyright materiel unless we have permission to do so.
History
The site has been on the go since 1999. It started off as a collection of my music that I had scanned in and made available. After a while I had so many tunes that I wrote a simple searchable database for them, and as more people began to visit and send me tunes I added them too. I also decided that it would be a great idea if people sent me their own compositions so pipers could try some genuinely new music.
I started expanding the site adding a forum where people could request and discuss tunes, personal pages for pipers - all sorts of stuff.
In February 2002 I received and email from Rob MacNeil pointing our lots of copyright violations on my site. There was not much to do apart from drastically prune any tune I though might be copyrighted from the collection.
Anyway - things continued on with more and more people coming to the site and sending me tunes. I still uploaded tunes I was sure were not copyright though it was a real pain trying to figure the copyright status out.
By 2002 the site was pretty well known, but I was starting to find it difficult to find the time to look after it properly - especially putting new tunes up as this was very time consuming.
In 2004 I decided to make some big changes to the site. The tune forum was being spammed and becoming impossible to manage, the people hosting the site made changes to the server messing up file downloads, and I was coming the realisation that I just did not have the time to work on the site to maintain it properly. I considered just closing the site - but could not bring myself to do it. Too many people still found the site useful, and at the end of the day I still enjoyed running it. So instead I moved web hosts and set up a brand new forum. With the new forum software I am able to allow users to do much more for themselves - and I've enlisted the aid of some of the regulars to help out running the site. I'm hoping that by making the site more of a community effort and removing me as the bottleneck the "Viper Piper’s Bagpipe Tunes" will take a new lease of life...I guess time will tell.
About Me
I live in Perthshire, Scotland. I work as a Software Engineer for a company near Stirling.
I've been playing the pipes since I was about 8. A few others and I were taught for an hour a day after school by a great old man called John Nicol. Sadly, John Nicol died a few years later - though by that time he had set us well on our way to enjoying piping
I played with the Juvenile "Vale of Atholl" band for a few years - we had a really cracking set of people and the last year I was with the band we won almost every competition we played in - culminating in wining the Champions of Champions.
Right now I just generally just play for the fun of it - sessions in pubs, the odd folk gig, tormenting my dogs, that sort of thing.
I'm currently trying to save my pennies to buy a set of Hamish's Border Pipes - if you have not heard them then get one of Fred Morrison’s latest two CD's and give your ears a treat.
Sponsors, Money and all that
This site is partly supported by advertising from sponsors.
I would like to thank Andrew Baker of The Baked Bean Company (Electric Pipes) and CeolMor Software (PiobMaster) for providing me with the free use of their software to put tunes on this site.
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© 2007 ViperPiper
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Forum
Tune Database