Buzzing

Despite various logistical challenges and time constraints (i.e. too much to do and not enough time to do it in) I was determined to play this evening. What with one thing and another it seemed appropriate. I also hit the buzz this evening. The fan has asked what I mean by "buzz": it is just that. The chanter seems to vibrate in my hands, under my fingers, the sound seems extra full and rich. It doesn't seem to be linked to how I am playing, although when it comes I think it improves my playing because I feel so joyous about it. I suspect it's to do with atmospherics, heat and humidity. Or perhaps the Monkey just felt in celebratory mood.

Not blogging but piping

Which is at least the right way round if I feel inclined to do only one of the two...

Picking and choosing

I love to eat, I love to cook, I love to think about food, and I love to read recipe books. I read cookery books for several reasons, only one of which is to identify new recipes might like to try. I might pick something because it has ingredients that I particularly enjoy (anything with aubergines) or because it has ingredients I normally have to hand so won’t require an extra shopping trip. I’m not likely to try recipes that involve ingredients I know I can’t get hold of, or those that look as though they are going to take three days and a couple of comis chefs to prepare. Pictures can help with the 
selection process, but I don’t need them. The recipe is normally enough to allow me to visualise the dish and how it might taste. 

The fan, on the other hand, cannot do this. If I show him a recipe I’m excited about and suggest I try it he tends to be non-committal. He’ll wait until it’s on the plate before him before he passes judgement. 

What I can’t do is look at a printed tune and know whether or not I am going to like the sound of the tune or find it easy to pick up. Nor can I often easily envisage a tune just from looking at the dots. I need the equivalent of cookery book pictures, which for a tune means that I need to have heard it, or need to be able to find it being played online so I can have a listen.

If I hear a tune I can normally tell if it’s a pipe tune or not, basically through the limited number of notes used! I’m getting better at listening to tunes and being able to identify the grace notes and visualise (or whatever the aural equivalent for that is) how the tune would sound without those gracings, or with less complex gracings. There are tunes that will accept a paring down and others that are nothing without their gracings. I’m getting better, too, at hearing which tunes needs their speed and which could sound well played at a more sedate pace. I’ve been listening to Flett, played at a much more sedate pace than I play it, and I know I play Loch Bee faster than Mr MacInnes. 

Conversely I’ve come across CD notes where a band will say that they have chosen to play a tune at a slower pace than is usual. So speed is a reasonably flexible thing, but there are some tunes that definitely need their speed. I think the thing I still find hardest is hearing a pipe tune played on fiddle and thinking how that will sound on pipes. Although pipes and fiddle sound good together the pipes never have the slide and glide that a fiddle can have.

It was after listening to Springfield a lot recently that I printed the dots for Heroes of both St Valery and Vittoria as both tunes got stuck in my head. The place that I found St Valery also had Sound of Sleat, which I hadn’t really thought of as a pipe tune before. When I first played it was as if I wasn’t reading anything new, more as though the dots were reminding me of a tune I already knew. I had the tune firmly in my head and felt that I was barely reading the dots as I went. The tune initially came together really quickly, then stalled.

I wrote this a while back and it has sat in drafts. Since then Sleat hasn't made much progress and The Session has had a discussion about whether or not musicians can "hear" tunes as they read the dots. Looks like I'm not alone in lacking this ability. 

This has festered in draft mode for a while more. Sleat and Heroes are being assimilated into my repertoire. I've been playing them this week.

Hup!

Kilbowie Cottage is coming along OK. I've been humming it, and in a controlled way, so I can stop it, or repeat it etc at will. The odd thing is that I seem to have the first and third parts... Listened to it several times on the way home and played it this evening. The first part is coming along nicely. Parts 2 and 3 are hesitant and part 4 not good at all, actually. But on the whole it's coming.

I've also been working on putting Heroes with Magersfontein. I think it will work: Heroes needs to be the first tune. Now I just need to cement the link in my head, so I've been flipping from the end of B part of Magersfontein to the opening bar of Heroes, over and over. I need to get the two running together as I hum them.

Finlay and the weavers

I managed to play today, but found myself struggling to recall how Kilbowie Cottage goes. I listened to it and thought I had it, but got confused once I was back with dots and pipes. This random failure to learn tunes is one of the reasons why I normally learn a handful at a time: though some fall by the wayside others will be left. Still, I will persevere, and I need to put The Big Spree or Highland Strands back in the car so I can listen to the tune.

Thanks to a recent birthday I have new listening matter. First is the Tannahill Weavers' Leaving St Kilda. I've only listened to it the once and it's good in parts, as they say. The tune selection is good: The Good Drying, Whistlebinkies Reel, Magersfontein I already know and its good to hear new versions of these; the rest are new to me and are a good selection of classic pipe tunes, well played. My only quibble with the pipe sets is that someone should have politely asked the guitarist to sling his hook: he's too loud, too high up in the mix, and, for my money, adds precisely nothing.

Pipe sets aside there are lots of song sets. In fact 8 out of the 12 tracks are songs. How can I put this tactfully? I cannot abide them. I dislike the singer's voice, I find the arrangements uninspiring. I was amazed when I first read Tannies' sleeve notes to find that they generally sing trad songs, because they manage to make them sound like 1970s hippy folk with a guitar and a tambourine. (There may not actually be a tambourine. It just sounds as though there might be). I was prepared for this, and after all, that's what the skip button on a CD player is for. I'm disappointed that so few sets are pipe sets, and bitterly disappointed that as far as I can tell the one instance of smallpipes (a strong reason for overcoming my dislike of songs and asking for this) is during one of the songs!

The second birthday CD was Finlay Macdonald. I can't remember how or where I came across him, I can't find the CD online anywhere, not even through Coda where it came from. A mix of old and new tunes, some written by Finlay. Chris Stout is credited on fiddle, which has to be a good thing. Currently on track three and so far very good indeed.

The dog ate my homework

I meant to play this week; I certainly never intended not to play. But on on Monday I left work 2 hours late, thanks to a meeting, and by the time I got home and rushed to the shop for a vital ingredient it was time for dinner, and afterwards...well, dinner and a large strap round your middle don't make a good mix, and I was too tired.

On Tuesday I left work an hour and forty minutes later than usual, hit traffic and added 50% to my travel time, got home, cooked dinner...

Wednesday I left work just an hour after my usual time, so a bit of progress. Unfortunately an accident on the route home meant I nearly trebled my usual travel time, got home, cooked dinner....

On Thursday things were different. I left work at around my usual time, added only 5 or 10 minutes to my usual journey time, got home, and was just putting dinner in the oven and preparing to fetch my pipes when the fan announced he had serious computer problems. So the evening has been lost to reboots, safe modes, last known good configurations and system restores and the blasted PC still won't boot up properly.

Tomorrow I am going to be in need of a system restore myself, which will certainly involve a glass of red wine and may or may not include pipes.

(Just editing this to note that it's my 500th blog post!)

Green eggs and ham

It doesn't matter what I try I cannot find a tune that Heroes likes, or a tune that likes Heroes. I feel that it doesn't stand alone as a tune, but maybe it's just that the more I play sets the more a singleton tune looks incomplete, lost and lonely.

It was Women in the Glen that I really wanted to play today. Neither Kilbowie nor John Macmillan came to mind so I ran through Rowan Tree, My Home Town, Galloway, Braemar, Troy, Loch Bee, Dargai, Magersfontein, Sleat. Bits of Eagle's Whistle, Brandy, Ocean and Miss G all bubbled up. I wonder how I will manage to keep learning new tunes and still hang on to the old tunes.

As if by magic

Kilbowie Cottage appeared in my head today. It's at that stage where I can hear it, but on the whole I can't hum it, and even if I sit and listen to it the moment I pick up my pipes it vanishes. The bits I can hum I can play: that's most of the A part, just about by heart, with a slightly muddled mess in  the two bars in the middle.

I find that the dots guide me in the shape of the tune, confirming the notes I can hear in my head, but where the timing is wrong in my head, or not there at all, I struggle even with the dots to play the tune properly, despite being able to read music.

I've had tenderness in my right index finger this week, at the middle joint and tip, and soreness in my elbow and shoulder. I am hoping it's excess use of a PC at work and that it won't interfere with what seems at the moment to be an insatiable desire to play. It has meant that I've failed to be comfortable with my bellows and had to abandon before doing my elbow serious damage. It's a shame, because apart from feeling the love and being keen to get this tune sorted, I just started getting the chanter buzz this evening, and as well as feeling good that always sounds fantastic and spurs me on.

Non stick

Kilbowie Cottage has been on my wish list for a while. I've got it on Highland Strands, which I have on pretty much a permanent loop in the car at the moment. It's a fantastic album. The odd thing is that although I think that I love Kilbowie I can never remember what it sounds like until I hear it. Of all the scraps and oddments from the CD going round my head Kilbowie is never one of them. I know it's best to learn a tune I can already hum, but even having the tune on repeat doesn't help, and I do want to play it, so...

I printed the dots, began to play, failed to make head or tale of it, wondered if I had printed the wrong tune (as I think I've mentioned before it is just Kilbowie Cottage and both Braebach and Kevin Macleod list it as John McColl's March to Kilbowie Cottage), abandoned and succumbed to the urge to play John Macmillan. Played a few other tunes, John Macmillan popped up again, went back to Kilbowie and fell straight back into John...

Eventually I remebered that I had The Big Spree indoors so listed to Kilbowie on there, where I discovered that actually it is rather like John  in the opening bars, and that it has some tricky timings, and it is a lovely tune, and it slips right through the hands of my musical memory.... In the end I managed a reasonable rendition of the first part, but it's going to be a harder one than I thought, especially while it remains so elusive to my aural memory.

Gimme five

I wasn't really intending to play, but got hit by the urge as I slid dinner into the oven. Women, Sleat, Heroes, Braemar and Troy. Heroes and Braemar I hoped would make a pairing, but they won't. Did a little work on that A, D grace, C movement in Braemar that I had and have since lost, but otherwise just straight play throughs. I need to keep up with Troy: it has a terrible tendency to fall apart very quickly. Today I couldn't get the third part to behave.

I really should pick another new tune, although I am also attempted to go back over one of the (very many) previously tried and abandoned tunes, in the hope that for some of them their time has come. Some I didn't like as much in the playing as in the hearing, but some fell by the wayside due to my lack of competence, especially when it came to speed, and it's those that I can perhaps resurrect.

Not much more

No piping today, but I thought I'd blog to mark the month in which I began my piping life. I got a bit over excited about it, as you do when you are young and always wanting to be older, and have been bragging to the fan that I shall be five, and if you count a year of the chanter then I suppose I am, but in terms of actually playing pipes I am just four, and not much more.

The monkey is, of course, just  two and a half, and poor neglected Morag is four. The blog itself - and this will be post number 495 - is about three and a half. I first posted on the old Podbean blog in February 2012, and we moved here with Blogger in November 2012.

I've had my piping ups and downs, and I've (mostly) grown out of stage fright, supported by the local musical community. I've come across a whole heap of great music and I've fallen in love.

My only regret is that I didn't start it all sooner!

Putting my money where my mouth is

This evening the drummer joined us at the session. And that was it: just him, me and the fan. So I had to pull put all the stops and put my new list into action.

I ran through all the singletons. As Father John didn't make it to Nova Scotia (my first attempt at a three tune set in public) I tried, and failed, to tag the Captn on to the end, and ended up playing it, rather too fast, on its own.

I fluffed (I did a lot of fluffing as nerves came and went) my way through Women, but didn't attempt either Sleat or Braemar, the one because I didn't think I was up to it and the second because I simply couldn't remember how it went.

Still, with the fan leading the other half, or probably two thirds, of the evening, we managed an hour and a half, ending with the audience clapping in time through the King.

I think I maybe getting the hang of this music stuff at last....