More notes from the tune clinic

It's odd how differently different tunes progress. McIntyre's Farewell and Capt Angus I thought were dead and turn out to be alive and well and rather thinking of getting together, which is great. My only reservation is that I think they may feel more comfortable on A. When did I last fire up the A chanter? Don't even ask...

The Cabot Trail is needing more work on grace notes: a common complaint. Miss G is currently the pester tune: she wants to be played after absolutely every other tune I play.

Some tunes arrive and very quickly are ready for release into the wild. Others seem to spend endless months suffering from false starts and relapses. some recover, some languish as chronic patients, and some die off....

Still, I'm playing a lot at the moment and, dead and dying tunes not withstanding, I'm loving every minute of it.

The reel thing

Now I've got the right dots everything is falling into place. I've been humming Alick C today: first time ever. Getting a decent speed up, too. Work needed on speed (getting faster, being fast and in control, keeping the speed even), on grace notes, and on the C part where I am struggling with timing in a couple of bars. Am going to work on the A and B, maybe get those by heart before I start on the C and D.

The fan suggests a new sort of challenge: that I set myself to learn a new tune between now and the next session. Not sure I'm up to this. I wouldn't be happy about taking a single tune, with no companion. I would need to find a tune, and decent dots. I think maybe if it was a march I might manage it, maybe if I played it a lot. Maybe. I'm so conscious of the tunes (Dragon, Rocks, Troy, Cudgel. Highlanders, Braemar, to name but a few) that I've pegged away at for so long and never got to be happy with. I don't chose tunes: they chose me. Still, it's an idea I haven't totally rejected...

Notes from the tune clinic

This is the current list of tunes being nurtured. The goal for each of them is that they are fit to be seen out at a session. Their problems are varied.

Horsburgh Castle. Diagnosis: unclear. I did wonder if actually I just don't like it, but I hum it often, and when I play it...yes, I do like it. Maybe it would sound better in A. Almost committed to memory, but regular lapses. Perhaps it's just waiting for its set-mate, Miss G.

Miss Girdle. Now she has got over her identity crisis she's recovering well. Suffering from a lack of grace notes. Slow in her movements, but gradually getting faster.

Troy's Wedding. Long term patient. A part fine and dandy. B part OK if I get the gracing right - a slightly sticky finger prolonging a grace throws me into confusion. C part either goes very well or goes too fast and goes wrong. Fingers often too tense at this point. D part - intermittent memory loss.

South Georgia Whaling Song. Tendency to go to fast and for snaps to either not appear at all or go so fast they are almost invisible. Despite ongoing attachment issues with the Cabot Trail has tendency for B part to morph into the Trail (which itself is suffering form a lack of speed control and a lack of grace notes.) It's annoying because this is a total relapse: I first played it at a session just weeks after starting to learn it.

Alick M McGregor. Much better now that I have moved from Session dots to proper dots. My problem is that whoever transcribed for the session clearly heard doublings as two notes, and wrote them as such, and I've been trying to add more grace notes, and this proliferation of notes has severely affected speed. Improving well.

The Irishman's Cudgel. Tendency to get stuck in a loop of B part, unable to recall how to get back to the A part. Those drops down to G don't always work very cleanly. Lack of grace notes. Generally improving.

The Braemar Gatheirng. Unhealthy attachment to dots, some stiffening of fingers, especially in the C part where I am having problems with D graces on the move from A to C.

Compliments to Roy A Chisholm. New patient, progressing well. Actually found myself humming the tune this morning for the first time and some of the repeating bars I already have by heart. A few more grace notes and a tad more speed wouldn't go amiss.

Five things - more Mr Macinnes

Five CDs that feature not enough of Iain MacInnes.

I realise I run the risk of sounding a bit obsessive and stalkerish here, but heaven knows there are few enough CDs out there featuring smallpipes, and even fewer featuring Iain, who is my smallpiping hero because I love everything he does. Although he has only given us a miniscule number of CDs of his own he has appeared elsewhere over the years. If you want to hear more of MacInnes, and who wouldn't, these are the CDs you need to get hold of. 

1. Shore Street, Billy Ross. A CD showcasing Billy and a good range of Scottish songs, on which he is joined from the old crowd from Smalltalk and Ossian, among others. Iain is credited on the first track (The Heiland Sodger). He is most certainly also on track 3 (Fiollaigean) but oddly uncredited... The pipes are right at the end of the song: blink and you'll miss them. The CD is well worth listening to. Billy has a soft and clear voice and there are interesting notes on each song and the Appalachian version of Matty Groves is worth the price of the CD alone. You'll never think of Matty Groves in the same way again.

2. Canterach. The band and the CD share a name. Now really and truly this is no less an Iain MacInnes CD than Smalltalk or The Carrying Stream. He appears on 9 of 11 tracks on whistle, GHB and Scottish small pipes. Somehow it's not one of my favourites: it's the keyboards, electric guitar and various bits of percussion and other such embellishments I could live without. It's Iain's playing,but not his usual style in terms of choice of tunes, instruments or arrangements.

3. Grand Concert of Scottish Piping. Two tracks and 10 tunes featuring Iain on small pipes. The rest of the CD isn't bad either. Two more small pipe tracks (Martyn Bennett), one lot of border pipes, and as a bonus, Allan MacDonald.

4. and 5. Tannahill Weavers, Cullen Bay and Land of Light. I've got both these albums and if it wasn't for the pipe sets I'd probably never listen to them. As it is I skip a lot of tracks.  Lots of songs that don't sound trad, but apparently are, lots of strummy guitar. The pipe sets are good and include Ian playing stuff you don't hear him doing anywhere else: a Gordan Duncan tune, for instance. The smallpipes make a few brief contributions, in the main Iain is on GHB. 

I saw the Tannies, years ago, in Colchester. It was before I discovered pipes, although I already loved them. The Tannies were just one of the fan's old favourite folk bands then, and I think he enticed me along with the promise of pipes. I remember I'd not long learned to knit fair isle holding the two colours one in each hand and I spent much of the evening contemplating fair isle patterns I might knit, and remember very little of the concert itself. Thank heaven Iain had left them, otherwise think how I'd be kicking myself now.

With compliments

Still playing most days at the moment, and enjoying it, despite cold hands, and cold pipes, which isn't a good combination. Suddenly thought to get the recorder out this evening and capture my latest tune: Compliments to Roy A Chisholm by Barry W Shears. Only been playing a few days, but it comes out at a good speed. A couple of points where I am pausing or slowing to check what comes next, a couple of outright fluffs. Not bad, though.

No drones, as always seems to be the case and I start with one of several twiddly bits that I use to check everything is OK. Not sure when I began this habit!

Felt I lacked air this evening - maybe because I'm playing fast tunes: this, Troy, Athol Highlanders, Drops of Brandy, Miss Girdle, Braemar Gathering, Alick C McGregor. Horbsurgh has gone on the pile of resting tunes.



Check this out on Chirbit

Gone, but not forgotten

I suddenly remembered that I used to play McIntyre's Farewell. I couldn't recall it at all. I flipped over the pages in the book, took one look at the first two notes...and discovered I could still play the whole tune by heart.

While I had the book to hand I thought I'd see if any of the Cape Breton tunes played on Piob is Fidheall were in there. I thought I found one. The name looked familiar, although as it's Compliments to Roy A Chisholm that's not surprising. Compliments are a reasonably frequent tune title: Fiddlers Bid play Chris Stout's Compliments to the Bon Accord Ale House, and the name of Chisholm is also familiar (tickets booked to see him this spring!)

When I pulled the CD out I found I was wrong and it isn't on the album, nor are compliments to anyone else. But it's a very good tune indeed, and I'm already getting a decent speed up with it.

Less speed at the weekend when we went to a new (to us) session to support it during the session leader's absence due to illness. Nice venue - not much like a pub at all.  The main downside is the rumble of trains overhead at irregular intervals. Nice friendly crowd, although we didn't really gel musically and people did their own thing here and there. We sat in a semi circle, facing out into the pub, concert style. I had very few nerves, and most of my fluffs were down to random memory loss and cold hands. Only once did I feel panicky and then only very briefly. Maybe the stage fright is going.

Are we downhearted?

I notice a trend now, that when things go wrong, or just not to plan, I'm less likely to be bothered and to give up or whinge. At one stage  I had a lot of whinge posts in proportion to the total. As I write this (my 410th post) only 53 others are tagged as whinges!

The thing is, I know that there are days when nothing fits, the bellows make my wrist hurt and my fingers numb. I know that there will be days when a tune - or several tunes - won't come, when my fingers don't seem to be attached to my brain or my brain seems only to remember A parts. I know there will be days when one tune just crashes out or won't come at all.

Experience now tells me that all these things will pass. Tomorrow, or the next day everything will have sorted itself as mysteriously as it fouled things up. Sometimes a break is the best form of practice. Sometimes that means literally not playing. Sometimes it means just playing tunes I know as they come to me, or playing tunes I used to know from dots, or playing tunes from dots that I don't know, or working over and over at one tune, bits of tunes.

And even when things go badly I can still enjoy the other bits, I can enjoy looking forward to better piping another day. And I can listen to some great music - I'm really enjoying Whistlebinkies, Jock Tamson's Bairns and Kenneth and Angus Mackenzie at the moment.