alt Hacker NewsYou can't play most of the same songs on both. Bagpipes (well, most forms of bagpipe, there are dozens, but unqualified people tend to mean the Scottish "Great Highland Bagpipe") are a diatonic instrument playing a just-intonation scale tuned to not cause discordant notes with their own drones, while guitars are a chromatic instrument fretted to play an equal-tempered intonation. The GHB plays in something rather close to the modern Mixolidian A mode with an augmented 4th, not any of the major or minor keys of modern Western music. The GHB and the guitar are entirely incompatible instruments, unless you're talking about a classical guitar with tied-on gut frets that could be replaced to allow playing the GHB scale.
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I have no idea what any of that means, but I love the deep knowledge that it expresses :-)
To clarify in case of insult: by "but unqualified" I mean "but, without qualification as to which type of bagpipe". I had no intention to insinuate that "unqualified people" are the only ones who talk about the Scottish Great Highland Bagpipe! I myself will say that I "play the bagpipes" or "am a bagpiper" when referring to the GHB, even though I also play Ceilidh pipes sometimes (a different, smaller sort of Scottish bagpipe with a different drone tuning). I don't play the Irish Uillean Pipes, Galician Gaita, Northumbrian Smallpipes, any of the German, French, Italian, Greek, or other sort of bagpipes. Unqualified, bagpipe usually means Great Highland Bagpipe.