The Bagpipes and the Recorder!!

[MadBagpiper]

<BEGIN RANT>

While the College of Piping tutors (as well as the National Piping Center tutors) are superb resources, I would paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes by saying that "A piper who is his own instructor has a fool for a teacher".

As I said, these are superb resources, but a beginning piper does not have a sufficiently well-trained ear to pick up a lot of the problems and subtleties that arise in early work on the practice chanter.....and for that matter, later when transitioning to pipes either. No amount of prerecorded material or written material can equal the immediate feedback available from a live human being with years of experience listening to pipes. When I was starting out, I drove 2 hours each way for lessons to get the best available instruction that I could. (yeah, yeah, yeah - I drove it uphill both ways in 18 feet of snow and blinding blizzards in mid-July)

Find a qualified and serious instructor even if you can only meet once a month and have to travel great distances to do so. A beginning piper will advance more quickly and learn more accurately. It will prevent having to unlearn bad finger position and technique later in the game. I have a student right now who purported himself to be "self-taught" and "having 2 years experience". I've had to completely dissect his technique and I can assure you, it's damned slow going. I've seen and heard too many self taught pipers through the years who can't even tune their bloody drones properly!

Bagpipes aren't an instrument that you can pick up and just learn. There have been organised schools of instruction of piping for well over 400 years. There's a reason for this. It may well be a horn with only 9 notes, but it's a complicated instrument and playing it correctly is a demanding proposition. As a piper for 25+ years, I ask anyone who wants to learn the instrument to take the time and make the effort to please learn it properly. Take the time to learn proper technique and develop an ear for the tunes and tuning. It's not enough to know how to hack your way through Scotland the Brave and Amazing Grace. Bagpipes are a wonderful, frustrating, giving, demanding, beautiful instrument. If you learn properly they will give a lifetime of joy and pleasure.

It's the self taught and "St Patrick's Day" hack-pipers who make our instrument a joke and cause serious pipers have to work harder to uphold and defend our instrument, reputations and our craft.


<RANT OVER>

The bit about the St. Patricks Day Pipers- Amen brother. Every time I say, "Yeah, I play Bagpipes." there are normally 3 reactions:
Reaction 1.)"Oh I LOVE bagpipes!!"
Reaction 2.) "Bagpipes suck, but if you play them then it's cool."
Reaction 3.) " I heard some guy playing them once and he/she was horrible/awesome."
If I left a reaction out, please tell me.

What pipes are you talking about? Ullieans (sorry, i don't know how to spell that) or GHB's??

[wgority]

What pipes are you talking about? Ullieans (sorry, i don't know how to spell that) or GHB's??

As I play both uilleann pipes and GHBs (as well as many other types of bagpipes) it applies to both. However, in this case I was specifically discussing Highland pipes.

Reaction 1.)"Oh I LOVE bagpipes!!"
Reaction 2.) "Bagpipes suck, but if you play them then it's cool."
Reaction 3.) " I heard some guy playing them once and he/she was horrible/awesome."
If I left a reaction out, please tell me.

Those are pretty much it. I'll also add the corollary that the intensity of Reactions 1 and 2 are usually directly proportional to Reaction 3

[MadBagpiper]

As I play both uilleann pipes and GHBs (as well as many other types of bagpipes) it applies to both. However, in this case I was specifically discussing Highland pipes.



Those are pretty much it. I'll also add the corollary that the intensity of Reactions 1 and 2 are usually directly proportional to Reaction 3

Ah, I see.


Of course! lol

[shane the piper]

im new to piping too and cant wait until the day I get my first set of pipes. Im still on the beginning scale but the way my pipe band opperates is you learn the scale before anything else and basically perfect it so im about done with doublings and should move on to the next note tonight! I have a friend whos father is a piper and from what ive heard hes self taught, I have listened to his music and he is an incredible piper and musician he also has a CD but i dont know what it is...

[highlander_Daz]

Firstly if you havent had a teacher there is NO way that you can be playing the movements correctly, even with all the books and DVDs in the world Trust me on this, there are several teachers that do lessons via webcam/ over the net etc (Bob Pinkman springs to mind here) Im sure that people can reel of lists of "self taught" pipers and I can sit here and reel off much better pipers who have had lessons, If you want to be a piper you need an instructor, its a simple as that even if it just someone once in a while to get the movements correct. Its unfortunate that many people "teach themselves" and the listen to a trained piper and realise they have to relearn the instrument, Its even more unfortunate that many of these Pipers are In Scotland, Edinburgh is notorious for bad pipers playing in the street "(here are also very very good ones) however the bad ones just rely on tourists not being able to tell the difference. Find a good instructor, get the Logan book , hit the PC for a few months and DONT buy cheap pipes of Ebay.

[JimB]

Ok...I want to learn the pipes. I really do. I can't really put in the money for lessons until next year because of other obligations, but I will take lessons from an instructor here. I want to go downtown buy a chanter from the local Scottish Store and start tooting, but I've held firm. I've heard enough from experienced pipers not to do that.
In the meantime...while I'm waiting to actually start, could someone please tell me what in the heck "grace notes" are?
Forgive me but I'm musically illiterate. That may be a good thing as far as my instructor is concerned though, because I have no bad habits to correct since I know absolutely nothing

[wgority]

Ok...I want to learn the pipes. I really do. I can't really put in the money for lessons until next year because of other obligations, but I will take lessons from an instructor here. I want to go downtown buy a chanter from the local Scottish Store and start tooting, but I've held firm. I've heard enough from experienced pipers not to do that.

Jim,

Usually a pipe band will offer free instruction for beginners with the expectation that the student will join the band for performances when he/she is proficient on the instrument. I note that you are in Salt Lake City. I've found these contact for pipe bands in Utah. You may want to try contacting them and see what their policies are.

Ben Lomond High School Bagpipe Corps J Ogden UT maxsonc@m.ogden.k12.ut.us
Galloway Highlanders 4 Clearfield UT rrowe@eagleut.com
J.T. Dunnie Pipe Band 4 Salt Lake City UT
Payson High School Pipe Band J Payson UT DouglasWelton@msn.com
Utah Pipe Band 4 Salt Lake City UT pipesanddrums@utahpipeband.org
Wasatch & District Pipe Band 4 Bountiful UT executive.director@wdpb.org
White Peak Centennial Pipe Band 4 Payson UT piperatlarge@netzero.net

Hope that helps.

[PiobBear]

could someone please tell me what in the heck "grace notes" are?

They're embellishments, short (no time value) notes made to embellish or accentuate another note.

[JimB]

OH...ok!
Thanks!

[haukehaien]

Emmet said:

They're embellishments, short (no time value) notes made to embellish or accentuate another note.

and he's exactly right. However, it may be useful to expand the explanation a bit. Grace notes are used in many different styles of music, but have a particular prominence in pipe music for two reason: pipes have no dynamics, and pipes play constantly (there's no good way of stopping between notes). No dynamics means that the Great Highland Bagpipes (GHB) have no means of varying the volume being played. When playing another instrument, dynamics are often critical, and are often noted in the music, so that the musician knows (a) how loud to play a particular passage and (b)where to change volume by crescendoing or decrescendoing. With the pipes, though, we've got no way of doing that. The volume we play at is the volume at which the reeds sound true and the tuning works. We can't really get quieter without the notes going flat, which makes us sound like a dying cow. (Bystanders' opinions to the contrary, very few of us actually wish to sound like dying cows.) This would tend to make pipe music sound a bit dull, since we have no good way of accentuating the music by changing volume, so we use grace notes/embellishments instead. The grace notes also serve to separate notes within a tune, because we don't have a way of stopping the sound without stopping the whole instrument.

For example:
One of the tunes I first learned is "A Mighty Fortress, arranged by Dr. Keith MacDonald in his "Church Piper" series. The tune starts with three high A notes, corresponding to the words "A migh-ty ... " in the song. If it didn't have grace notes, these would all run together and sound like a constant tone. So instead of playing that, I play high A-high G-high A-high G-high A.... The high G grace notes are very short, and have the effect of separating the high A notes, making the tune sound like it should, rather than having it start with a long single unbroken note.

Grace notes provide a lot of the "sound" associated with pipe music; if you hear a pipe piece played without them, it will often sound kind of dull. Some poorly-taught pipers never learn to play the grace notes, and are referred to derisively as "big-note" pipers. (Grace notes are written smaller than the melody notes.) They're an important part of piping, and a large part of any good piper's practice. Pianists practice scales, ingraining the scale in the different keys available to them; pipers, who are limited to only nine notes, practice gracings, learning to play the gracenotes anywhere they occur in a tune.