Trough of disillusionment

I am managing to play four days a week. I am managing to play in A each time, and that's fine, but I am always more comfortable, more at home, in D.

Progress with learning new tunes is painfully slow. I seem to have had the same sets of dots on my music stand for months. Maybe it is just that I expect a higher standard from myself these days before I am happy to shift a tune from the learning pile to the learned pile. Maybe I'm not picking tunes that really inspire me. Maybe I don't play enough. Maybe this is just as good as it can get and I've learned all the tunes I can. No. Scrap that. I don't believe that: I have a prodigious memory for trivia. I must be able to collect tunes too, and I certainly hum a lot of tunes.

I need to learn more tunes. I need to work on playing with drones. I need to work at timings and tempo of tunes. I need to play more evenly. I've got too many tunes where I speed up and slow down depending on how well I know bits, or how easy they are to play. I do feel as though I am making little progress, perhaps slipping back. I hope it's just like climbing a long shallow slope after you've clambered up a steep hill: the slope seems easy and flat by comparison, but when you look back you realise that over a distance you've actually made quite a climb.

It occurred to me that although I've been listening to a lot of really good Scottish folk of late I haven't listened to much in the way of pipes, so I've Tryst on the CD player. I'd forgotten how good it is, how much I love the tunes. and the arrangements There are pieces with no pipes, just fiddle perhaps, and other pieces that are just pipes. And I do love pipes.