Blaming the tools

The fan is out this evening: he's playing rather than drinking, not being a real ale fan. I'm mucking about here on my pipes. Feeling that I'm getting OK at tuning my drones. I can hear when they are wrong and am starting to have a better hit rate at getting them right again.

Playing about with the Battle of Waterloo this evening. It's OK. Much of it by heart. Pretty pleased with the speed. The Green Book, well, the third volume, which I bought and have barely glanced at, gives bpm for tunes. I seem to recall that 140 is a number that crops up from time to time, so when the fan was trying the metronome app out yesterday and worked out I was playing one tune at 118bpm I felt as though I was finally getting some speed up.

I need to think about some pipe maintenance: those collapsing drones sound awful and it's very distracting when they go mid-tune. I have hemp, I just need to use it. Maybe when I have the Monkey I can send Morag back to Simon for some maintenance. Watching me play yesterday Vicki commented that she thought there was a lot of air going through my pipes and maybe I (or Morag) had a leak. She also talked about being ready for a better instrument, and how there are things one can do on a better instrument that aren't possible on a less good one. It's a shame, in a way, that beginners start out with the cheap stuff - in all sorts of fields - because often the best quality materials are easier to work with and give a better result. The most basic square knitted with a gorgeous hand-dyed merino is always going to look a million times nicer than a square of acrylic, although admittedly a plain DK acrylic will be easier to handle than angora, or a lace weight yarn. What I am trying to avoid, though, is this feeling that any lack of quality in my playing is down to Morag and not me. Morag may hinder where the Monkey will (hopefully) help, but it's a bad workwoman who blames her tools...

Anyway, back to the Battle. I played better this evening, but managed not to capture those efforts on the recorder, of course. I've even managed my favourite trick of discovering I've not hit record and have therefore not captured the version I thought I had, then I did a better version and got an error message form the recorder ...

Lots of errors in this one, and I'm using dots. Partly trying not to distract myself by checking the recorder for more messages, and partly massive drone collapse in the middle, after which everything sounds foul, but I wasn't going to get a semi-decent run through get away just because of that.

I vary from the dots to play the tune how the fan does it, and that mismatch catches me out. Still managing GDG instead of GDE on the triple As - in fact sometimes I think it's only GD or even just a solitary G. Presumably I should have a squillion other graces in there, but... Timing: bad: too many places where I stumble at speed through a bar and muck it up. Oh, and while I'm throwing a bucket of criticism at it, I seem to have no idea how to stop this tune. Speed is OK thought, isn't it?


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