Bagpipers’ Olympic effort to win title

But this is, in fact, the  regime being adopted by  Scotland’s leading pipe band in a bid to bring home the World Championship title.

The international competition, to be held in Glasgow on Saturday, has not been won by a Scottish outfit since 2005. So European champions the Boghall and Bathgate Caledonia Pipe Band are honing their tuning skills, using new reeds – from a secret source – and adopting the mental approach of Bradley Wiggins and the all-conquering Team Sky British cycling squad to gain an edge.

Pipe Major Ross Walker said the band have been obsessively tuning their pipes for the past 12 months, aiming to beat  the reigning champions, Northern Ireland’s Field Marshal Montgomery (FMM) Pipe Band, who last year won all five major championships.

“What really separates first and second prize is the  tuning,” Walker said. “And the differences we’re talking about at the very top of grade one are minuscule, but to the trained ear they are obvious.

“Trying to get the final 2 or 3 per cent takes an incredible amount of work and time, to get your instruments prepared. So in terms of hard work, that’s the main difference in the past 12 months, trying to get that tuning.”

Bagpipes are notoriously temperamental, with temperature and moisture affecting the way they sound and making them difficult to tune.

Roddy MacLeod, principal of the National Piping Centre in Glasgow, said: “In a grade one pipe band, where it’s normal to have 22 or 23 pipers, each of their chanters has to sound balanced and bright, but should be identically in tune with each other. And that’s just the chanters, where you play the melody with your fingers. There are also the drones – every set of pipes has two drones and one bass drone. So in a pipe band where there are 22, 23 or 24 pipers, it means you’ve got upwards of 66 drones to be tuned perfectly.”

Walker said that in the two weeks prior to competitions, he and his second-in-command were working with each piper on tuning.

He has also changed the make of chanter reed – the thin strip of material in the mouthpiece which vibrates to produce a sound – for the band. He said. “We’re now using a local reed manufacturer. The quality of reeds has been making tuning that bit easier.”

He declined to name his supplier, stating that such information was sensitive in the run-up to a competition, but said that in order to beat FMM, he had been studying the mental attitude of Team Sky, with which Wiggins won the Tour de France.

“I found a parallel with  Bradley Wiggins and the Tour de France,” he said. “They spoke about the little fractions of the different things that the cycling team did.

“When you add them up, they [become] significant, and I think that’s what the FMM have been doing. They’re just better at lots of little things, and it adds up to a lot.”