When Braebach came to town

I wish I could blame my silence here on hours of pipe playing, but sadly I'm playing very little at present. It's partly the pre-Christmas knitting rush. Like other knitters at this time of year I am knitting against the clock. One neck warmer done, one pair of socks cast off this evening. A scarf will be cast on this evening, then that leaves another scarf and another pair of socks. How long
until Christmas?

At least I've been out to see some piping this week, when Braebach came to town again. They are a good band to see live. They have a good line in banter and jokes. The pipes have more power live - I find them a little washed out on their CDs. Our local folk club is in an old church, with a fantastic acoustic for pipes.

They mostly played from their new album, Urlar. They threw in Good Drying, from Desperate Battle of the Birds, and the Caber Feidh set and The Rolling Hills of the Borders from The Big Spree. I like this song, and I enjoy the use of Gaelic song that Megan has brought to the band. I can live without Calum's singing. He's a fine piper and whistle player, and presumably a decent string player, so I don't know why he persists in singing. I'm not keen on either his voice or his choice of songs.

The band is definitely Scottish, but they have lots of big bass lines, and a jazz feel. Perhaps this is the way the Easy Club might have gone! They have a good mix of traditional (how many bands play pibroch?) and modern. I love James D M's piping and did the fan thing at the interval and went to tell him (he was on the merchandise stall) how much I am enjoying his solo album.

Take your partners

I have a few sets potentially coming together. I feel a bit like a marriage bureau. You pick a couple and you feel they have much in common. Sometimes it's love at first sight. Sometimes it starts well and ends in a nightmare of recrimination and violence. Sometime it starts bad and ends up just perfect. Sometimes it just doesn't work at all.

I'm wondering if the Rowan Tree might get along well with Magersfontein. I'm in too minds about tempo changes in sets - it can spoil the mood somehow. But they start on the same group of notes so the segue from one to the other seems to work.

The Nova Scotia tunes (Captain and Cabot Trail), well, they both come from Novia Scotia, so surely that's a good starting point for a relationship. The main problem is that the pair of them insist on flirting with the Whaling Song and while no one can agree to a menage a trois neither can any pair bring themselves to commit. The Whaling Song is getting overly attached and I find that the A of Whaling keeps running into the B of Captain.

I'm also thinking about introducing Flett to Bee. There's a geographical link again, with both of them hailing from Scottish Islands (Flotta is Orcadian, Loch Bee is on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides)

Meanwhile, I'm flirting with the King again. Our early passion drifted into quarrels, but we're working on patching things up.

Noting today my stamina - just under an hour and many tunes back to back, breaks few and short. I played D and A. A was for the King and Farewell. I made the mistake of playing D first and struggled to adjust, with the bag, drones, bellows all feeling different the moment I switched chanters. Everything felt heavier, more hard work, less comfortable.

Declutter

I can't bear clutter. Excess stuff weighs me down, makes it hard for me to think. I like clear, tidy, open spaces. I've been steadily collecting a pile of printed sheet music and the bigger the pile gets the less I can think about what I want to do with it, the more untidy it gets, and the harder I find it to locate tunes or remember what I am doing with them. I've decided to be brutal and jettison a whole lot.

The tunes are all very nice, but somehow I just haven't clicked with any of them. Maybe they don't sound their best on pipes (Farewell to Whisky, Braes of Castle Grant), maybe they need to live with other tunes (Dragon, Brose), maybe they aren't that fun to play (Sleat), maybe I've never quite got them right (Cassino), or I've never got them by heart and felt at home with them (Lochanside, The Congress Reel). Whatever it is they aren't tunes that are right for me just now, and I need to get rid of them.

I'm hoping to concentrate instead on finishing Troy, learning some new tunes from the Seaforth Highlanders, and maybe tackling some harder tunes (Snuff Wife, Alick C McGregor).

Nearly new

November is an auspicious month around here. It is the month of my birthday (don't ask), Morag's birthday (two!) and my birthday as a piper (also two, although the fan likes to point put that I played chanter for a year before that).

At the end of my second year of my piping life I feel good. I feel confident enough to tell people that I am a piper. I play in public. I know a handful of tunes. I really feel as though I have a good grasp of all the basics: I know how to play the pipes. It's not that there isn't more to learn, or that I can't improve in what I am doing - far from it. But I can just pick up the pipes and play without having to think about anything. Even if I have a break I don't feel as though I've gone backwards and need to pick up the threads again: I just get on with it. It's second nature, now, it's what I do.

Identity parade

I don't often seem to have tunes in my head these days, which is a shame. However, there was definitely one rattling round my head today. It seemed rather familiar and I was pretty sure it had escaped from the Desperate Battle of the Birds. The problem was that once I was in the car, playing the CD, all the tunes were familiar, but I couldn't quite picture *my* tune. I thought I would know it when I heard it, but apparently not.

I thought I recognised Battle of the Somme when we went to see Anna and Mairearad on Monday, but it turned out to be Ellie's March. It was a very good evening. I'm not the world's biggest box fan (OK, I'm pretty much allergic to boxes, with exceptions given for Dermot Byrne and Simon Thoumire - always assuming a concertina counts as a box) but I do love jokes, musicians having fun, great guitar work and good tunes. My only disappointment was that the fiddle and pipes only made one brief appearance apiece. More pipes on the CD, luckily.

Too much of a good thing

I'm not doing very well with either playing or blogging. My day job is pretty dire and it seems to be sucking all the energy out of me, so I'm not getting round to much else at all, annoyingly.

Earlier this week I took delivery of a cubic metre of compost for the raised beds on the allotment, primarily for my new asparagus bed. It took about two hours in total to scoop it into buckets and chuck it into the beds. I managed to avoid blisters, but my arms have been feeling the strain.

So when the fan reminded me that it was the Foresters session I though I'd better get the Monkey out and see if I was fit to play. I played happily through a few tunes so felt happy to go out. I wasn't brave enough to try the Nova Scotia set, Loch Bee or Magersfontein. I stuck to Flett, the Whaling Song, the Tree and My Home Town. That was a small risk as I haven't played it in a while and wasn't sure if I remembered the B part, but the mice knew it, of course, and I just left them to it.

I don't want to play the same old tunes each month, but the fan says it's useful for the others to get to know my tunes so they can learn them too. Not sure how much use that is in a session that has, apart from me, the fan and the organisers, a pretty shifting population.

One who seems to be becoming a regular turns up in the middle, plays three songs, loudly, in a row, and then walks off with out saying a word. This time he brought a friend who said to the table at large "is it OK if I borrow your mandolin", with his hand already on the fan's baby. The fan said he felt he could hardly say no, and restricted himself to pointing out that it is £2k worth of instrument... Luckily I can't imagine that another piper would ask to borrow the Monkey, and it's not something that people dabble in - you're either a piper or you're not. Despite having been brought up to share anyone asking to play the Monkey would get a very firm"NO!!" in reply.

I got the recorder out this afternoon, but then couldn't remember what I had recorded lately. I played McIntyre's Farewell in A, which reminded me that I should play A more often. I went on to the King, which the fan always says sounds better on A. Struggled to get it right. Played Galloway, just to prove I can still get through a tune on A. Switched to D and got the King at last, then various of the usual suspects. I wonder if I've got to  many new tunes on the go: I forget what I'm playing, forget which tunes I already know.

I just need to practice more - it's the one thing I can't have too much of.

Just passing through

Not getting much playing time and kicking myself for not making more effort when I had 4 days off work last week. Interesting discussion on the Session around how to fit practice in, how often to practice, how long for. Several people saying 15 minutes a day is better than nothing, whereas I've come to the conclusion that is just tokenism and doesn't help anything...

I had the practice chanter out this evening to work on those tricky bits in the Highland Brigade at Waterloo. Slow, but coming on.

Emma Sweeney was excellent last night. She has a style all of her own and sounded less American live with just a guitarist than she does on the CD.