I seem to be working with a lot of people right now on “blowing and squeezing”. The Great Highland Bagpipe of Scotland is one of the few wind instruments in the world where “the breath” has nothing to do with the musical line. The job of the breath on our instrument...
Stop, drop and roll is what we teach people to do if they are ever on fire. We need to have something like that when it comes to practicing. Practicing isn’t about playing something over and over again until something happens. What we need to do is practice...
A while back, I wrote about how developing a tune is like baking chocolate chip cookies. To review, the first step in making chocolate chip cookies is the dry mix; the flour, salt, and baking soda. In tune development, it is the rhythm. During this Covid-19 pandemic,...
That’s what I said: “Building any tune is like baking chocolate chip cookies!” Let’s think about that for a minute. When you bake chocolate chip cookies, you initially start out with the “dry ingredients”, right? First we combine the flour, the baking soda and the...
Recently, I took a poll amongst fellow pipers and piping students in order to learn what kinds of problems/challenges they faced in learning to play the bagpipe. The biggest problems by far were memorization, musicality, and rhythm. Personally, I happen to believe all...
Learning to play the Bagpipe is about coordination and muscle memory long before it is about the actual music. I find in working with my students that they don’t do enough repetitions. If you have a gym membership and go regularly, each exercise has a number of “reps”...
