However I found out that my suspicion was right: My practise chanter was out of tune, SOOOOO much... none of the stuff I had been practising for months plays on the real bagpipe. And since it is incredibly loud, I cannot be practising at home just blindly and producing a horrible noise.
I ordered another practise chanter, but this time it costed me £40, and it was a long polypenco chanter (the best choice for practise chanters, if you ask me). It is supposed to sound almost as good as blackwood and it is also the best to take all the moisture in the world.
When it arrived, to my delight, it was tuned with the real pipes and now I'm all happy with my cheap set of pipes.
Now, looking at the tutor and the video CD that came with the chanter I have the feeling that it is going to be very handy to learn to deal with some scotish tunes and practise all the grace notes, a necesary evil. However, this is not my goal. I don't need to learn scottish stuff in order to play it on performances, but to practice fingering.
Right now I have a long list of German bagpipe bands on my Ipod such as Furunkulus, Cultus Ferox, Corvus Corax, Saltatio Mortis, In extremo... (now that I notice, all their names are in Latin). Their melodies are hundreds of years old in some cases, much simpler but still in need of grace notes every now and then. I will use my practise chanter to learn the grace notes at the same time I learn to play all these popular melodies.
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