I started on the usual this evening: Dargai and Gaelic Club, playing attention to gracing. Bee, paying attention etc. I wasn't having much fun and decided to just frolic, musically speaking. So I threw off the tyranny of repeated notes and phrases and played MacIntyre's Farewell, My Home Town, Bonnie Galloway and the Rowan Tree with gay abandon.
Then I decided to play Over the Cabot Trail and Capt Angus L MacDonald. I had to think a bit abut the Trail. I played the A part twice before I realised I was actually playing the Farewell at speed. Tried again and went into Bee. Got out the dots...and realised I was missing some grace notes, so started to work on those... (The Captain I decided was alright as he is.)
My tendency is to avoid complex (i.e. multi-note) graces. I will often stick in a GDE, a birl or a strike instead. But what I have noticed of late is that although I plays Gs and Es aplenty I rarely, if ever, play a D, except when I am playing GDE on a set of three As or Bs. You'd think D would be the easiest and most intuitive, being played on the index finger of your right hand. As a right-hander you'd think it would be the easiest finger to user, the most flexible. Surely that's the finger we pick when we want top point, or scratch, or gingerly touch something. It's the most hard working finger there is, and yet when it comes to piping it turns out to be an A grade shirker. I've been noticing lots of Ds where I either play G or totally ignore it and play no grace at all. There seem to be lots of tunes where if you move up from A to C you fling in a D grace. I need to work on this.
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