The importance of the manuscript as a musical source, apart from its antiquity, is the almost unique nature of the music. Almost all of the 40 pieces in the manuscript are long variation sets on dance tunes – one, "Dorrington", running to 14 strains. Much of the figuration is similar to early Northumbrian smallpipe music, but the compass of many of the tunes is 9 notes, from F to g, with no sharps or flats, rather than the single octave of the unkeyed Northumbrian smallpipes of the time. It thus seems that the music was written either for smallpipes with an open ended chanter, like Scottish smallpipes, or else for what are now known as Border pipes. Both of those instruments had largely died out by the mid-19th century, and their repertoire had survived only in fragments, mostly in adaptations for other instruments, such as fiddle, Northumbrian Smallpipes, or lute.