The Scottish smallpipe is a bellows-blown bagpipe re-developed by Colin Ross and many others, adapted from an earlier design of the instrument. There are surviving bellows-blown examples of similar historical instruments as well as the mouth-blown Montgomery smallpipes, dated 1757, which are held in the National Museum of Scotland. Some instruments are being built as direct copies of historical examples, but few modern instruments are directly modelled on older examples; the modern instrument is typically larger and lower-pitched. The innovations leading to the modern instrument, in particular the design of the reeds, were largely taken from the Northumbrian smallpipes. Although there is evidence of small pipes dating back to 15th century, in its current form it is perhaps the youngest bagpipe with widespread popularity, having only existed in this form since the early 1980s. Characteristics Scottish smallpipes are distinguished from the Northumbrian smallpipes by the open ended chanter, and usually by the lack of keys. This means that the sound of the chanter is continuous, rather than staccato, and that its range is only nine notes, rather than the octave and a sixth range of the later 18th/early 19th century Northumbrian pipes. The instrument has a cylindrically bored chanter, most commonly pitched in A; pipes in D, C, B flat, and G are also common. Being cylindrically bored, the chanter sounds an octave lower than a conical-bored chanter of the same size, such as that of the Border pipes.The basic scale of the Scottish smallpipe is identical to the Mixolydian scale of the Highland and Border bagpipes: the 7th (leading) note on the scale is flattened, meaning in the case of an A chanter, the low and high G notes are natural, rather than sharp (as they would be in the scale of A major.) Scottish smallpipes are most commonly tuned to be played with the same fingering system as Highland bagpipes (sometimes called 'half-covered'), however they can also be tuned to accept a 'covered' fingering system (very similar to that of the 'closed' system used for Northumbrian smallpipes), where only one finger is lifted from the chanter to play each note, the only difference to the Northumbrian system being that the tonic tonehole on the chanter is left uncovered (except when playing the low leading note.) Scottish smallpipes are normally bellows-blown like the Northumbrian smallpipes and Border pipes. The advantages of bellows-blown pipes, such as greater stability of tuning