In fiction, music is seen as a large part of pirate culture. Is this true? What instruments would they've used?
Pirate are usually pictured as thieving drunkards, feared by sailors and coastal villages. What would they actually have been like? Also, would they actually have the alcohol to even be drunkards?
Would pirate ships have a large amount of cannons as they're usually shown?
If you have any other information on pirates it would be very welcome. Thanks for your help!
The fiddle, the fife, and the hornpipe were the most common instruments on shipboard. Sometimes a musician would play while the crew sang a sea shanty to keep time on a long piece of work such as manning the capstan to haul the anchor. (Sea shanties to call time for shorter hauls, such as a halyard, would usually be sung without accompaniment.)
Rum was available and cheap in the Caribbean where pirates often hung out. (At least it was available and cheap in the British West Indian Islands. It was illegal in the French Islands. If you have ever wondered why there was a lot of rum made in New England instead of in the Caribbean, where all the sugar cane was grown, it was because the French government (under pressure from Cognac producers in France banned the production of rum in the French Caribbean. So, that is where New England traders bought the molasses to import to Boston, to make the rum to sell to Africa to buy slaves to take to the Caribbean to buy molasses to take to New England to make rum - and thus the "Triangle Trade" known to every school child.)
Pirates often had small ships, without many cannon. If they could get larger ships with more cannon, they would. Generally it was not so easy for pirates to re-provision with gunpowder and shot. (The more piratical they were, and the less like privateers, the more difficult it was.) So even if pirates could capture (or take through mutiny) a large ship with many cannon, they might find it difficult to keep it well equipped (some periods, when they were being more or less supported by various governments were easier to buy powder than others).
In any event, although pirates sometimes had large ships such as Henry Avery's "Fancy" of 46 guns (taken from the Spanish by mutiny), or Blackbeard's "Queen Anne's Revenge" of 40 guns (captured when she was a slave trader from the French by pirate captain Benjamin Hornigold, who gave her to Edward Teach (Blackbeard) who mounted the 40 mismatched cannon in her), many pirate ships were much smaller, and relied on carrying a large crew to take prizes by boarding, rather than by threatening them with cannon.
Sources: http://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/sea-and-ships/facts/ships-and-seafarers/life-at-sea-in-the-age-of-sail
This thread on Piracy by Benerson Little should serve to answer many of your questions, hopefully.