My new CD arrived today, thanks to Coda. I've had listen to it, and it's good to hear smallpipes and a different player with different interpretations. Can you hear the "but" coming at the end of that sentence? I think my biggest reservation is the electronic keyboard that accompanies many of the tracks, making the whole thing sound a bit like a midi file. Some of it is swelling electric organ music that I suppose is meant to evoke great emotion, but strikes me as being a bit new age, a bit sentimental. It also means you lose the drones, and what are pipes without drones? The keyboards weren't so noticeable on the clips on the website (unlike the honkey tonk piano which was very much to the fore on the clips of the other CD I looked at and I am sure he's a marvellous piano player but I know I couldn't sit through a CD of that, even to hear some nice pipes.)
I was hoping to hear more traditional tunes to help me find new ones to play, but a lot of this is written by the player himself. As the maker is named on the front of the CD cover and the player only on the back I get the impression that this is perhaps a CD put together by the maker as a sort of advert for his pipes. Perhaps the price of getting a decent piper to play was the keyboards and the self-written tunes.
Where are all the smallpipers? And why aren't they laying down tracks on CD to share with the world?
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