[1] Robert Bright in Travels through Lower Hungary(1818), quoted by Flood (p. 79), describes the Hungarian bagpipe as having two drones and a chanter of square section (in other worlds the Dudelsack).

The melody pipe has a "flea hole", a common feature in Eastern bagpipes: the top hole on the chanter is very small and uncovering it raises the pitch of any other note by approximately a semitone, making the Hungarian pipe largely chromatic over its range (it lacks a major seventh).

In some historic examples, the magyar duda was tuned with a neutral (i.e., between the major and the minor in pitch) third and sixth and the flea hole was filled in with wax.

As the Hungarian economy improved and the pastoral lifestyle declined in importance, the lone piper at a country ball or wedding was increasingly replaced by professional Gypsy bands (cigányzenekar) that played an urban repertoire on more complex and capable instruments.

Béla Bartók's composition "Bagpipe," from Volume 5 of Mikrokosmos, is a piano piece that imitates the sound of the duda.

Despite these stories, the duda never received the same sort of official censure in Catholic Hungary that bagpipes did in many Protestant nations.