Practice Chanter Newbee

[imrichmond]

I am thinking it would be nice if chanters had the holes offset for right and left hands so the wrists are in a more natural, less bent angle. I don't know if this would cause playing issues or not in the future. I see a lot of highly bent wrists and bent fingers watching pipers playing. I suspect one leads to the other in trying to ease the wrist angles. I can see this is less severe with a bag under the left arm "propping" it up. It would bring the straight fingers more onto the same plane with the chanter rotated slightly to the right.

I'm not really sure what you are seeing here, unless you are watching mostly pipers who never learned proper technique. When playing the pipes, the wrists should not be held at an angle, let alone at a severe angle. This is true also when playing the practice chanter. On the practice chanter, the wrists usually become bent at a significant angle because the player is holding his/her elbows tight to the body. The elbows should be held out from the body far enough that the wrists can be held straight and relaxed, basically in line with the thumbs. Holding the elbows tight against the body is a problem common to beginners and also often leads them to curl their fingers around the chanter. Similarly, when playing the bagpipe, the wrists are often bent because the player has the bad habit of pulling the chanter inwards towards the body. Both these errors cause tension in the fingers. In the case of the bagpipe, the problem can be caused by a bag that is either too large or the wrong shape for the player and/or a blowstick that is too long. A properly fitted bagpipe should cause no discomfort in the wrists and certainly should not cause them to be "highly bent".

[tundramanq]

I have been moving my elbows out some. I will try more. Thanks. This book needs to re shoot a lot of pictures that are showing poor techniques - bent fingers, fingers way up from the chanter, finger tipping holes that should be behind the first joint and elbows barely out from the torso. It totally omitted the elbow information in text. Things like this are a pain when my nearest piper is 40 minutes away. ( I step off the soap box - )
Some of this has been corrected here and some I knew was not right or omitted by watching two rather good pipers very closely.

[OC Richard]

When the pipe chanter is played in the bag it is rather lower and further away from the body that a practice chanter being mouthblown; also the chanter is at a rather different angle vis-a-vis the player.

For me the position of the pipe chanter in the bag is much more ergonomic, and indeed the wrists are comfortable and straight.

In the old days a thing called a "practice goose" was popular, which solved this issue. The "goose" was an ordinary practice chanter in a bag with blowpipe, no drones.

I knew a kid years ago who stuck a long piece of clear aquarium tubing on his practice chanter's mouthpiece which allowed him to hold the chanter at the pipe-chanter position while he practiced.

A longer top or mouthpiece on your practice chanter will help by moving the chanter further down, but the angle is still different.

Somehow the different position of the practice chanter and pipe chanter hasn't bothered generations of pipers very much! But the difference does exist, and it throws the hands and wrists into a different position.

[OC Richard]

1. the pressure is much higher than what the sax needed.

My theory is that traditional Practice Chanters were made with extremely high backpressure/impedence (far higher than is needed to produce a note of that volume) in order to build up the lip strength of the beginner in preparation for playing the pipes. The Gibson long PC is rather more "free-blowing" and more musical sounding, in my opinion, that traditional-style PCs.

2. I will be toning up muscles not normally used - my abs and rib muscles were a bit sore this morning.
3. This PC is a lot easier to blow today. It's either cleaner lungs or the plastic Walsh reed actually has a break in period - or both. I doubt that my muscles got significantly stronger over night.

A PC shouldn't be THAT hard to play! You can put a little rubber band around the blades of the reed to make the thing easier to blow and more quiet.

4. All harmonic damping on the PC has to be done manually. The sax seemed to do it automaticly via all the linkages.

Hmmm... not sure what you mean there. True that, on bagpipes, there are many expressive devices which must be done with the fingers which on "ordinary" woodwind instruments are done with the embouchure. These include bending notes and vibrato. Odd that the Highland pipe tradition doesn't do these things, when every other bagpipe tradition ones looks at, for example the Irish uilleann pipes, the Central French pipes, Bulgarian pipes, &c note-bending and vibrato are Standard Operating Procedure. One theory is that Highland pipers laid aside note-bending and vibrato when they learnt the traditional Gaelic art music of the harpers, the music now (ironically) called piobaireachd.

5. doing a clean scale is weeks away especially the D to E and back- five fingers moving on both hands together? OMG

Yes when going from D to E, every finger on the bottom hand has to reverse position. But that's nowt! When you go from D to High G all seven fingers on the front of the chanter change!

The trick in going from D to E is to make sure that the E finger is clear of the chanter before those three bottomhand fingers come down. In other words, there is the slightest nanosecond when all are raised. If the bottomhand fingers come down a splitsecond before the E finger is lifted, you get the evil "crossing noise" or "crossing note". (BTW in many other piping traditions, for example the Bulgarian and Asturian, these are done intentionally and are a vital aspect to the style.)

About avoiding these crossing notes, you can keep in mind this trick:
-when going to a higher note, let the uppermost digit involved in the new note initiate the movement
-when going to a lower note, let the lowermost digit(s) involved in the new note initiate the movement.

So, many beginners have trouble going cleanly from Low A to D, because they let the D finger lag behind a bit, getting a short C before the D. If they keep in mind to initiate the movement with the D finger this issue goes away.

Likewise it's common to get a crossing note when going from E to C. But it goes away if you remember to initiate the movement with the lowerhand fingers, so that they are clear a splitsecond before the E finger falls onto the chanter.

7.You can't snicker at yourself and maintain proper reed pressure at the same time.

Or when you burp: the pressure goes lower for a moment no matter what.

[tundramanq]

I am having to reduce practice to a maintenance mode of 2 or 3 minutes, 2 or 3 times a day. It, combined with other non-one handed duties, was making my "golfers elbow" get worse instead of better. Being the left hand side, at least the little finger stays idle. I wait until the ibuprofen kicks in to practice and ice the elbow when done. Tendonitis is sneaky, the pain is from inflammation, so by time the pain kicks in I have overdone it. I did find out that raking leaves one handed is easy Progress will be glacially slow for a while.

[Piobair]

Chanter shouldn't be too hard to blow. Most beginners I've taught almost universally over blew the reed to shut off. Your lips should give out before your lungs, but you shouldn't be in pain! Orthodontic elastics on the blade (folded over depending on diameter) should close the lips. As for your wrists, it's almost certainly a result of bending your fingers. Bottom hand should be center pad of ring, middle, and index fingers, center and slightly toward bottom on pinky (low A). Should cause wrists to flatten a bit and avoid cramping. Also, get in the habit of playing with chanter bottom elevated on a table. For some reason crotch players (I'm sure there's a better term) tend to fold in once they're on the pipes.

Unrelated.... Is Mike Katz playing uilleann bellows in that clip? They look huge.

[Calgacus]

Unrelated.... Is Mike Katz playing uilleann bellows in that clip? They look huge.

Well spotted, but no, they are a set of smallpipes and bellows made by another top craftsman, Ian Kinnear. He is pioneering bigger bellows and stronger reeds in his pipes.

http://www.scottishsmallpipes.com/