moonlitnarwhal wrote:
1. Are there good books or on-line resources for beginner smallpipers (with material specific to the SSP) or do raw beginners typically look to GHB books and tutorials and somehow adapt this to the SSP?
All of the people I know who play Scottish Smallpipe played GHB first.
There's no reason you can't learn SSP on it's own though. The fingering is easier, because with GHB if you don't close the bottom hand the notes will be out of tune, but with SSP it doesn't generally seem to matter. That is, you can use open fingering like on whistle. You can also use fully closed fingering too for a lot of stuff and it works fine. That definitely doesn't work on GHB.
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2. I do play the tin whistle have some experience with traditional Irish music, and I have had some success with using ABC notation and MIDI sound files to begin learning tunes - is there a database or other on-line collection of ABC tunes for the SSPs?
I don't know about SSP specific repositories, but GHB music mostly uses BWW or BMW format (same thing), which is just like ABC, except it's different

There is a program that will translate though. BWW2ABC. There are thousands of GHB tunes in that format. You can also find a freeware program that will read the BWW files directly. Since the notes are the same, and the fingering can be the same, you can play any GHB tune on SSP. Some of them won't sound as good.
You can ignore or make use of the grace notes as you see fit. It seems like many SSP players use F gracenotes instead of G as the basic articulation. Some SSP player argue that tunes with a lot of bottom hand gracenotes sound muddy on SSP.
If you can read sheet music, you can find more tunes than you can ever learn (7000+ settings) at ceolsean.net. It's an archive of public domain bagpipe music books.
BWW2ABC is here:
http://moinejf.free.fr/BagPipe software:
http://r.fifi.free.fr/BagPipe/english.htm