Learning to Ride a Bike

Fisrt posted Aug 19th, 2012 by newpiper

Had a good practice on Friday. Discovered I could play My Home Town, Leaving Barra and Castle Dangerous from memory. It's bit like stabilisers on a bike. All stabilisers do is allow you to learn to ride with stabilisers. There comes a point where you still need to learn to ride without. Thinking about it just makes you fall off. What I need is the musical equivalent of my Dad hanging on to the back of my saddle saying "don't worry - I'm right here. I've got you; you wont fall" and then letting go, without me knowing, so that I sail off and I am really riding a bicycle all on my own. And it goes fine until the moment when I twist to look behind to tell Dad something, only Dad isn't there, and I fall off, because thinking about riding a bicycle is harder than riding a bicycle.

I was hoping to make a sidebar list of tunes I'm playing, but can't find a way of doing that easily, so I'm going to list them here and re-list at intervals, so I can (hopefully!) see my repertoire expanding. The fan says I should get to know thousands of tunes, but I know that no matter how many new recipes I try each year I always end up cooking the same amount - some of them may be new but old ones slip off. I seem to have a maximum capacity for recipes. Hope my tune capacity is going to be bigger. My current tune list is very small, but I'm slowly dropping out all those that actually suited the chanter better, or that I learned because the Fan suggested them - I'm finally building up a repertoire (as I said I wanted) of tunes I've heard and really love (and Ceol Sean is helping with that - going through Tryst the dots for practically all the tunes are on Ceol Sean).

So - those tunes.

Tunes I can play, with dots, but can do good chunks dotless

• The Atholl Highlanders (dotless on this pretty much since I started with it)
• Leaving Barra
• Castle Dangerous
• The Barren Rocks of Aden
• My Home Town

Tunes I can play with dots only

• Banks of the Allen (although I occasionally get bits of the B part dotless)
• The Rowan Tree

Tunes I am working on at the moment

• Joe McGann's Fiddle

Tunes on my pile of things I really want to learn

• Troy's Wedding
• The St Kilda Wedding
• Heights of Casino
• The Boy's Lament for his Dragon

Hector the Hero

First posted Mar 16th, 2012 by newpiper


No luck with Nigel's tune, mostly because although it plagues me all day it vanishes the moment I arrive home. However, I thought I should have a go at Hector the Hero. If I fiddle about on the pipes I often end up falling into a couple of bars of Hector, which mysteriously I then struggle to identify.


I've spent two evenings working on this - playing it, checking dots, playing again, checking dots again. I'm not 100% confident with it, but it's OK. The version here showing that slight lack of confidence. Some of the unevenness of sound I'm blaming on the fact that I was walking round the room as I played. My drones don't seem to be in tune. Some of the notes are a bit wavery. My timing isn't great and and my playing lacks any real feeling or lyricism.


I find when I'm not using dots I can somehow think more about the bellows and bag, and pump less and put more pressure on the bag. I feel as though I've been swinging by my arms - a definite sign I'm doing things differently today. I had a quick run through of the polska with dots, and then found I could get a half decent version without dots, so perhaps it's going to be like riding a bicycle and my brain just now knows how to memorise a tune. That would be nice!


Glad to find I can still play Dusty Pipes by heart - I was afraid the whole thing was a fluke. I did have to start with the second part as I couldn't remember how the first part began, but once I'd run through the second part I went straight into the first without any problems. My fan tells me this isn't unusual.


Small steps - still going in the right direction.


Recording - Hector the Hero. Lost! (Retrieved version on closer inspection was the fan playing the tune on fiddle)