Sound of silence

I spent June learning one or two new tunes, but generally polishing existing tunes. I had intended to make recordings, to demonstrate progress, to spur me on. Somehow I didn't get round to it.

Today promised bright and has turned grey and damp, so rather than go to the plot for more harvesting and weedicide I got my pipes out. I think this recent flurry of activity is in part due to the knowledge that tomorrow is a session, the first since July, and I'm afraid of sounding rusty.

So, pipes - and recorder (as in, recording machine, not the instrument). I intended perhaps to do Flanders/Perth and Flanders/Valery in the hope I could decide which is the better pairing. I played this and that by way of warm up, including a reasonably tidy effort on Women/Sleat, which I didn't record because I wasn't expecting it to work. My right hand has a tendency to tense during Sleat, and my bellows tend to slip, which suggests to me that I am not yet comfortable with the tune and am hunching myself up, which, of course, makes things worse.

I had a dry run on Flanders, which I was pleased with, then hit the red button and messed the tune up three times, and several more times after that, even when I'd given up in recording. In the end, thinking I'd have nothing to show for my efforts, I recorded Magersfontein/Vittoria forgetting that it's not five minutes since I last recorded them.

I still feel that my repertoire seems to have hit some sort of steady state whereby new tunes edge out older ones. I've been humming Athol Highlanders, stumbled on the dots for Troy, which I think I had forgotten I ever knew, hardly think to play Braemar (which still needs work), actually had to check the dots before I could play Rowan Tree or Galloway.


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You've changed

I logged into Chirbit today, only to find they have gone for the same tedious web design as everyone else on the planet. It took a moment or two to remember my username and then I was in. The first tune I uploaded was The Braemar Gathering. Turns out it was also the last tune I uploaded, four months ago. Took a little bit of head scratching to find the bit that gives me the html to drop the link into here, but I got there in the end.

Now, I've not listened to this or the previous version since recording. I will have to compare the two. For this new version, even though it's now a tune that just appears on my fingers rather than only coming when I specifically want it, it still has some errors. There are phrases I snatch at, garbling notes together, although generally I am more relaxed than I was. I've lost the D grace on the low A to C transition. It was making my fingers tense and although I've managed to relax my fingers I've not managed to bring the grace back. I'm not sure about the speed I am playing at, whether it wants to race, or be a little slower. I actually had the dots in front of me, but once I know a tune they are distracting more than anything else.

Recording itself was easier than I've found it in the past, although I did have to ask the fan to remind me of one or two of the various steps. I feel that I had no real red button-itis. It's just a recording, not a performance, and if I fluff bits (which I do) then that's fine. I seem to have taken the pressure off recording. Even so, the tune isn't yet reliable enough to play in sessions, and it is partnerless with no idea at all which tune it might sit with.



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Comparing apples and pears

I put my tablet on a higher surface this evening, which means I've got a better view of myself playing, but it makes it harder, of course, to compare with yesterday's footage.

I felt today as though the drones were sitting too low. The bellows strap was loose so my bellows kept working their way around my waist. The strap was cutting into my arm above my elbow. I also had some problems with my wrist resting on the bellows uncomfortably. The chanter was somehow in the wrong place so my fingers kept missing: it's a bit like typing with the keyboard off to one side, nothing is quite where you are expecting it to be.

On the plus side my left arm ached, and I think the reason is that I've been working the bag more than the bellows, which is good. I suppose it's also good that despite everything I managed to play tunes, shoving the bellows around, angling the chanter, hoisting bits up and pushing other bits down while I played.

I need to play like this more, try videoing myself a few more times, probably look at footage of other pipers to see where everything is sitting in relation to everything else.

I've labelled this with the now little-used label whinge, but despite the list of things that aren't right I am quite happy, and sure I'll find the perfect tube length soon.

It was all going so well

I've been having a good day. It's not a working day, which is always a bonus. The weather has been much better than was being forecast earlier in the week. I went shopping for a pair of wool trousers for work and actually managed to find some I liked. I did some tidying at the allotment and managed to rig up some proper protection for my cavolo nero plants.

Then I decided to play and record... The lead for the recorder was tied into electrical spaghetti. I'd forgotten the faff of having to "create a song" before you even start. The first three-tune set I recorded and then wasted 6 minutes mastering it only to find when I tried to export it that there was allegedly no track to export... The fan salvaged the situation, and the recording, but only after I'd got cross. Add to that the collapsing bellows, a sore elbow, and a general inability to play and the whole thing is a mess.

Recording here is Father John's Boat Trip. The repeat of the 2nd part still isn't quite right. Gracing not very clean, fingers not cleanly enough down on the  chanter. I mised various repeats, which I put down to red-button-itis. Various times I found myself thinking that *this* would be the place where I'd be likely to fluff it...and duly fluffed.

No drones. I recorded a rather poor version of Braemar in which I garbled notes, merged notes, went too slow and then too fast. I will post tomorrow. I couldn't face recording it again and I am not sure how soon I'll be able to bring myself to record again. Is it any wonder that it's over 7 months since I recorded last? There has to be an easier way.

(On the positive side, Andy won a match.)
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As good as a rest

I thought I'd give myself a break from new tunes today and just play whatever came to mind or fingers. Oddly enough the first tune in my head was Father John, so I played his Boat Trip to Nova Scotia.

After that the play list looked like this:

The Rowan Tree
Magersfontein, Flett, Dargai, Bee (too many for a set, but that's how they came out)
Bonnie Galloway
My Home Town
King of Laoise
Amazing Grace

I've been considering making a list of all the half-learned, or learned and abandoned tunes I have left behind, but I feel it would be a very long list and perhaps rather depressing.

I do also need to record. Maybe at the weekend.

I do, I do, I don't

Troys's Wedding again. It started well. I wanted to slow it down, but fingers wanted fast. The more I played the more it fell apart, but I'm not worried: this has happened before, this whole getting worse before it gets better shtick. I need to give it a break now to let it simmer in my brain.

Also played Braemar, which is ok as long as I remember that the note I need in the run up to get it right is C. Father John's Boat Trip to Nova Scotia, Miss Girdle (the final phrase over, and over, and over....), Troy again, Brandy (which I am feeling quite fond of having listened to Realta yesterday). The door bell rang and I went to pieces, knowing I was being heard by an unknown quantity...so flipped in to Dargai and Bee and ended up with the Heroes.

Yesterday I listened to an elderly recording of Troy. I've improved since then. Must get around to recording.

My best side

From time to time I see adverts for diets. These normally involve two photos: a before and after shot with the after featuring the dieter either looking slim (or at least, slimmer) in a flattering outfit or wearing an item from their pre-diet wardrobe, holding out the waist band to demonstrate the difference. The before shot often seems to feature the dieter wearing their skimpiest, most ill-fitting outfit, maybe a bikini… I assume that these are the photos that finally made the dieter realise that the days of blaming puppy fat or describing themselves as having big bones had to end. I am sure the after photo is a matter of pride, but personally I feel I’d not want to look at my before photo, ever, unless to remind myself (having recovered a lost pound or two) exactly what the end of the slippery slope looks like. It’s embarrassing, surely, to be reminded of past failures, lapses, youthful idiocies and indiscretions: we like to move on.

I think this is one reason why I’ve been so bad at making the recordings that were the intended purpose of this blog, the reason for it being web-based instead of another in my pile of paper notebooks. Firstly I always want to have the best possible recording: not necessarily wanting the equivalent of a photo that makes me look half a stone lighter and three years younger, but at least not wanting the equivalent of a photo of me caught  the hop, squinting at something, my hair unbrushed, spinach on my teeth…

Secondly, once I have got that snapshot of my playing, which I am always disappointed in from the outset, I find looking back at those embarrassing. Can that be me? Fluffing that phrase there, mangling that grace note, playing so very slowly? Even at the time I find the recordings hard to listen to and to listen to them after a period of time is just too much. So I don’t listen to them.

The third reason has always been that recording is reasonably time consuming and setting up the recorder, recording, mastering tracks, transferring them to Chirbit, linking them back to a blog post – which has too be written  – all take up good piping time. It also takes some of my concentrations, breaks the flow of playing, of moving from one tune to another.

I think I should try though, just to remind me, if I have a day where I fluff a note or a grace note I’m happy with, how far I’ve come.

Mulling it over

I‘ve been thinking for a while now that I should try again to play every day for a month. I seem to be very patchy with my playing at present. That’s partly down to the usual distractions and partly just feeling less need to play at the moment, maybe because there is less music around to inspire me now that the band has gone. When I do play daily it’s never as hard to fit it in as I think, the more I play the more I feel I want to play, and each time I’ve played daily for a month I’ve made real strides forward. Now I’m a more established player I expect that those strides will be smaller or less obvious, but even if it only means learning a new tune or two and getting my piping mojo back it will be worthwhile.  

In some ways it isn’t a bad thing to have a break. I find I can pick up my pipes up again without feeling that I’ve gone backwards at all. Some of my tunes need a moment’s thought or a pause for adjustment, but in terms of speed some tunes seem to be faster after a break.

I recently read a discussion on The Session about coming back to tunes after a break, which suggested playing through tunes each day, leaving the ones that are still working, carrying the ones that need fixing on to the next day. This feels a bit restrictive to me: sometimes I am just not in the mood for a tune, although now that my repertoire is expanding it would be useful to brush up on the tunes that I don’t play often. Some tunes I play from time to time but never feel I’m playing as well as I’d want to, so that they are fit to be played at a session. I’d like to brush those up.

I’d also like to try some new tunes and I know from bitter experience that I never learn them as fast as I want to, and some never click for me, either because I never really learn them well, or because I somehow don’t enjoy playing them.

I don’t want to restrict myself with a specific plan.  I never seem to follow plans, and I’ve never wanted my playing to feel like a chore, a set of things to do. I prefer to go with the flow, working on what I feel comfortable with and interested in at that time, having the space to be inspired, to experiment, to go with the flow.  So I think I’ll keep it vague: I’ll play every day, I will aim to play everything in my repertoire at least once, I will have a fiddle with some new tunes.  I’ll try to do some recording. Oh, and the chosen month is September.

Not bad

I thought I should so something about my plan to record some old tunes in the hope of seeing some improvement. This is MacIntyre's Farewell and Capt Angus L MacDonald. The recorder cheerfully ran out of memory half way through the first play through and time was wasted (good piping time!) while I fiddled about deleting stuff.

Other than that recording was fine, and I managed to remember the correct sequence of creating an item, recording, setting in and out points, laying down a master and exporting it.

I should have fiddled with settings a bit more - dropped the volume. I stood to play, with the recorder on a table beside me and did some swaying and shuffling about. I don't think that's too obvious on the recording.

As for the playing: it's not bad, I think. It could do with being more evenly paced, more measured, more controlled. No drones, as is often the case. But, the first attempt with the full memory aside, this was the only take I did and I have done absolutely no editing at all.

Not bad, for a beginner, I reckon. Not bad at all.

(What I haven't worked out on my Galaxy Tab is how to select the code to paste it in to Blogger to get the link. Glad that the fan still has a PC!)




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Gather round

Almost the end of my month of playing (as near as dammit) every day. I meant to do a lot of recording, but have failed miserably on that score.

I did manage something today. It's the Braemar Gathering. Not too bad. You can hear where I get those snaps backward and somehow I've lost all the D graces between my low As and Cs, although they came back as I carried on playing. Just the first three parts. Hoping to get these a little tidier before I add in the last part.

Now wondering what I can play it with. Deaf Shepherd put it with Morag MacNeil, Tangusdale, Colin Clark Carruthers (which sounds as though it ought to be a cautionary tale, possibly involving a boy who shunned pipe practice), New Hands and Donella Beaton.



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Fast and furious

A bit of multi-tasking this evening, piping and recording in the gaps between getting some washing done and dinner cooked. Have I ever mentioned that I don't have enough hours in the day?

I've been feeling bad about not recording. It was the whole point of having a blog and foisting myself on the internet, otherwise I could have bought myself a nice notebook to scribble away in. I whipped out the recorder this evening, and immediately hit a hitch: the plug was missing. Again. The fan kindly searched while I played with an eye on the clock. Then I had to set up the machine, then I played, suffering from red-button-itis (i.e. badly), then I hit the wrong button when mastering the track down just as the oven timer started beeping at me...

The fan managed to retrieve the error, and I sat down to blog and then my sister rang with an urgent query about the correct wording for a wedding invitation, and now the evening's almost over and I need to get this typed before I run out of time. Have I ever mentioned my problem about the number of hours in a day....

The (mangled), droneless tunes are Troy's Wedding and the Atholl Highlanders. I can, and do, play both better than this, but I was in a hurry. Lots of mistakes and hesitations in both. Lots of my fingers running away with the tune and getting confused. I had dots to hand as I see no reason to stress myself out with being dotless and recording now that I have nothing to prove in that area.

Utterly no gracing in either other than what is utterly necessary to divide two notes the same. This is partly due to having non-piping versions of the dots, and partly just the speed. Speed is one thing they do have, I think.

For comparison, there is an older version of the Highlanders (on my previous blog, which does seem to have been reinstated), which I describe as "reasonably fast" and now seems laughably slow. That's from August 2012. A more recent recording of Troy - September last year.

One good thing I did notice, not today so much, but this week: fingers going like the clappers, elbows and mind calm and relaxed in the background. That has to be a good sign.

PS - wrote this on Monday and had problems uploading the tune. Thursday today - more cooking, washing and piping - same tunes, no recording, so played much better, of course...!


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Mystery

I've been working on some faster tunes: Troy, which has really fallen by the wayside of late, and Athol Highlanders. I need to find dots to remind myself how the fourth part goes. The first part is OK, third ok-ish. But the second! For some reason I cannot fathom the first ACE is a doddle: it makes nice shapes with my fingers, it's good to play. The second, which comes straight after the first is next to impossible. Nearly every time I play I get it wrong, or just grind to halt. Then following that is the ADF, which is even worse, because I can't get it right even the one time. I've tried speeding up, slowing right down, repeating, repeating, repeating... I should record. At one stage I had more recordings of the Highlanders than anything else, but since I moved blogs and lost tunes I seem to have none at all...


Here's another odd thing. I only played briefly yesterday for headache-removing purposes, and decided to play D only. In D again today, and perhaps because I was going fast and getting things wrong and thrashing out bars rather than playing tunes I felt the need to give myself a treat to finish, so moved to A for a tune.... Actually feeling, just after 2 days of D, that I'm losing comfort with A, although much had to do with my hands being so cold and unable to stretch, and A is my favourite right now.


I'm also being plagued by a mysterious tune. I can hear it very clearly, although only as a plain tune: I can't hear any accompaniment, but I am sure it is a Mr MacInnes tune. I hum it, and after a while it morphs into the Heights of Cassino, which I haven't played or heard for an age. Very odd.


The other reason for the brevity of my playing yesterday was that we were going out to hear a spot of music from Messrs McGoldrick, Doyle and McCusker. No mystery there - just some great tunes and some great musicians and a really good night out.

Mitigating circumstances

I've had a productive day today, making a batch of cheese, cutting back the raspberry canes and a good hour's piping, although some of that was wasted fiddling around with the recorder. (I need to get to the fan's PC before I can upload recordings: my netbook isn't keen to speak to the recorder).

It occurred to me that I'm perhaps being a bit hard on myself when it comes to progress and improvements. As I've already mentioned being able to play dotless once meant that I could scrabble through one playing, with gaps and pauses for thinking, now it means pretty much note perfect when I play the tune over and over and over.

My benchmark for a tune well played used to be a handful of tunes I could just about hold together, now it is a handful of tunes that I've been playing regularly for a year or more, that I am relaxed and easy with.

When I learn tunes I am getting fussier about timing, tempo, grace notes. I don't pick a tune and learn it, I pick three, four, five or more and learn them. I spend time going over my new tunes, repeating phrases I'm not happy with, fiddling about with gracing, and then I run through half a dozen tunes that I know well and feel comfortable with, just to enjoy playing some music. I don't play everything in my repertoire because I just don't play for long enough to fit everything in. I suppose I could make an effort with some of the tunes I'm not playing so much, but I expect their time will come.

It's not that I am getting worse; it's just that I have set my sights higher, and have bigger expectations for my myself. I suppose that's how we all learn and improve.

Insert a caret

It's always easier to do something right. Unpicking knitting is harder than knitting. Sticking in extra grace notes after you've got the tune is a real uphill struggle. I need the dots again, I need to slow right down...and as soon as I move way from the dots I speed up and all those carefully inserted notes vanish.

I'm sticking with A, loving its deep resonance. I'm playing McIntyre's Farewell a lot. Some of the tunes I started the month with are coming on, some fell by the wayside.

I don't feel as though I've been playing much, oddly. All but two days this week - I think that's all but two days this month, plus about a week before January began. I ought to have recorded: I meant to try once a week. I suppose I don't feel I am making enough progress, but then how can I tell if I don't record so I can listen and compare...

Goldilocks

The fan is out this afternoon - the band has a gig. I could have gone to the plot where there are courgettes to clear, but it's snug inside and dark and windy outside and I didn't fancy working on the plot with one eye on the weather. There's supposedly a storm coming...

I got out my music stand, and my pipes, and the recorder...but couldn't find my stool. My stool is a short, four legged reject from our bathroom, and as it happens it is just right for playing pipes on. The height is good, I like being able to face different directions as I play. I have no idea where it has gone. It normally lives in a corner of the bedroom. We have another stool. It's a smart designer stool, and the height is OK, but it fixes you to look in one direction only. Still, it was all I had.

I'm struggling to find the right moment to ditch the dots. It used to take me forever. And now? We'll, I think I've played Loch Bee on four occasions and already I have big chunks of it by heart. It's disconcerting: I can't quite believe I'm ready. And I'm not totally ready, but it does mean that the awkward patch where the dots distract from what I remember and vice versa comes ever earlier. It also comes at different times for different tunes.

I know that it rarely works if I hit record the moment I start playing, but finding the right moment is not easy. If I leave it too late I can end up being too tired. I warmed up with Troy, Harlaw, Highland Brigade, Whisky. In between I played My Home Town, Flett and Whaling. I ran through Loch Bee...and it was poor. My timing seems to have gone to pot and, as I've said, the dots were distracting but I don't know it enough to go dotless yet. I stopped for a mug of tea and listened to the tune a few times over. The version I have here is OK, but not great. Generally good - smooth, rhythmic, musical, reasonably graced, but some bits fluffed.

Harlaw is going to take much more work. I've listened to it with the dots and it's not clear always where the pipes and end the harpsichord begins and I *think* that sometimes the harpsichord is doing the gracing. B and D parts causing most trouble. I feel I need some of the gracing. The drops down to G between two high As dropping to D are going to take some work. It's good, actually: it's a long time since I worked on grace notes.

Highland Brigade at Waterloo I need to listen to. It also needs work on the gracing because it doesn't sound right with the gracing stripped out, and my usual repertoire of simple G,s, Ds, As and strikes won't work either. The C part is the challenge - high A again, this time with low A to E interposed, and before those a drop to low G with a G grace. It must have a name, but I don't know it. To make life easier for myself, and hopefully speed up the learning process, I am going to stick to the first three parts and leave the other three for now.



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And there's more!

Another new tune - The Shores of Loch Bee, aka the Sands of Loch Bee or the Glasgow Police March Past. I wish I'd got the recorder out, because I printed the tune out and played it for the first time this evening at a really good pace, and it sounded great. Slight hesitation  over the timing of the end bar of each part, but other than that really good.

The tune was in my head, which really helped. On the Session, where dots are verboten, there is a saying along the lines of you shouldn't play a tune until you know the tune. Certainly knowing a tune makes it easier for me to play through with the dots. Part of me feels that actually I should just be better at reading dots...

Interestingly, one of the sites offering the dots described Bee as a "difficult" tune. In terms of the notes it's a really basic tune, nicely repetitive in the standard way, and short. I guess it's the gracing that warrants the rating, although apart from a handful of taorluaths there's nothing hugely challenging (says she, cheerfully ignoring 90% of it, as ever!)

The tune felt very familiar, and the fan said he thought he knew it. I reminded him that it opens the final set on Sealbh, and played it to him. Oddly, Iain pays it at a slow and stately pace, where I've been playing it at a lively lick. It sounds so familiar at the faster pace. I wonder if I can have heard it somewhere else?

Wedding jitters

I'm in a fractious mood at present. It's partly the time of year: the usual feeling that summer has gone, that I've somehow wasted it; the realisation that it will be months before the light evenings return; a nostalgia for (mythical) summers passed. There are also various potential changes ahead that are both exciting and disconcerting.

I've hoped that piping would help me snap out of this mood, and it has improved things a little, but not given me the real lift that I needed. I'm still trying to flip between A and D, between drones on and off drones. Today I stuck with D and only used drones for some tunes.

I haven't blogged every day but I have still played every day so far and am inclined now to push through to the end, except it may be taken out of my hands because I have to go to Glasgow on Thursday, where I will be tantalisingly close to the National Piping Centre, and I'm expecting to get back very late and very tired. We'll see.

Back to today, and Troy's Wedding, still droneless as I am still learning it. I was pleased to find I could play the bulk of it dotless, other than the 8 first bars of the D part which I mysteriously missed out altogether. It went so well I thought I'd record...this is about the fourth take when I knew each take was just going to get worse as I got steadily crosser with my inability to play.

First off, it's not as fast as I thought I was going, although in my defence, I did start slow in the hope of mucking up less than on previous attempts. My G finger got over exited and inserted a number of superfluous G doublings. My F finger got slightly sticky and mucked up some notes. The bag cloth wasn't pulled back properly and kept obscuring the thumb hole, making gracing on high A difficult. I pick my way through bits I pretty much almost know and then make a hash of the following bars which I definitely know. Comparison recording here from 2 months ago. More work needed.



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The long and short of it

The problem with long tunes is not just the length: they are also more varied than short tunes. So, to take a few random examples, a short tune might have 16 bars (eight each in the A and B parts) of which nine are unique. That would be Cabot, for example. The Captain has ten unique bars. Flett and Dragon have, I think (the layout of my copies is poor) 12 unique bars. Magersfontein actually only has one repeated bar. But when I say "unique" there might only be a variant of one note.

Then there are the long tunes. Troy has 44 bars, if you count the second time round variations as new bars, which they are. Twenty five of those little blighters are unique. Castle Grant also has around 44 (some of this depends on whether or not you count the lead in notes in bars on their own). I can't face counting unique bars, but there will be many. Longer tunes also have more of those almost repeated bars, and they might have several variants of the almost repetition, so you then have to remember which you need each time. Throw in the fact that you stop repeating straight A parts and B parts but instead have second endings on some parts and the level of complexity ratchets up a notch or two.

I wish there was something in between, but I suppose if I persevere then eventually I will start to learn long tunes by heart.

I've been humming tunes a lot, including, rather oddly, Banks, which I've not played in ages.

While I'm on a run of things I've not done in ages I have actually recorded. I've also gone back to drones. It's too long since I played with them. A mix of worrying abut annoying new neighbours upstairs and learning tunes. The neighbours are away for some weeks and the chanter is back in action for learning on, so I must get back to them. It took the fan ages to tune them up and then they sounded too loud, too droney, and the D (I thought I'd treat myself and play the D today) sounded squeaky, harsh, unfamiliar.

I felt a little short of air, drones wavering. I had half an eye on dots, but the drones distracted me. Still, I think I carry on smoothly after each mistake. It seems a little fast and I think the slower tunes are perhaps better on the A. Oh, and although the fan's fancy new software allowed me to snip off the mangled start I moved straight from mangling into the tune proper so it starts rather abruptly. Still, here it is, MacIntyre's Farewell by Barry W Shears.


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PHOP

Knitters have a concept called PHOP, or pennies per hours of pleasure. The idea is that you take a pattern from a charity website and the amount you give reflects the hours of pleasure you anticipate getting from that pattern. Patterns give pleasure in various layers. First there is the pleasure of imagining the lovely finished article in various different yarns, browsing yarn stores and eventually buying the yarn, then there are the various hours spent knitting your item, and finally the pleasure of wearing it, or giving it away. Patterns are always money well spent.

It's not unlike the concept of cost per wear for clothes, where you divide the cost of an article of clothing by the number of times you wear it to get the actual cost. So £250 pounds worth of lovely linen jacket that you wear all summer long for five years in a row (yes, writing from experience here) is actually better value than £80 of jacket that you wear twice and then leave to gather dust in the wardrobe.

Why am I talking about clothes and knitting? I was thinking about the large amounts of money I spent on my Monkey. I already had a set of pipes, so I didn't exactly need another. I also paid for extra keys, which I haven't yet used, and silver engraved mounts, which make precisely no difference at all to the way it plays or sounds. It was a large outlay. But when you think how often I've played those pipes since May, of the absolute pleasure I've had from playing those pipes, well they start to look like a real bargain.

The pipes had this usual uplifting effect this evening. Picking out a bit of a tune and wondering what it was I discovered it was part of the Shetland Fiddler, which I've abandoned of late, Clearly it would like to come back.

I was going to add to the hours of pleasure for this blog post by attaching a recording. I recorded McIntyre's Farewell. It's lovely and I'm so pleased with how it's going. I playing it smoothly and fluently, glossing over the minor errors, not pausing between repeats or sections. I'm already humming it, already picking out bars, and I only first played it through a week ago. It went so well I thought I'd do Castle Grant while I was at it, as that's also just early read through stage, but sounding good.

Then as I went to master the first tune I got a "card full" message. Duly deleted two tunes I'd left on, tried again, same problem. Now I know why the fan was keen for me to get a second sound card. He didn't mean that I was filling it up - he meant that he had.

A recipe for happiness

Take one long and tedious week, stuffed with boredom and frustration. Sprinkle liberally with end of week lethargy and garnish with the sort of headache that comes with crunching noises in your neck. Add one small black velvet Monkey in D and a collection of tunes, new and old. Apply for one hour.

It works a treat. The only reason I'm not bouncing off the walls in total ecstasy is that when I played Troy fast and furious the recorder wasn't on, and when the recorder was on my playing wan't fast and furious. We all have our off moments.

The fan says I'm almost up to full playing speed and asked how it felt. It feels slightly scary, as if I'm not quite in control or very close to skidding out of control. I'm also finding that although the very small finger movements needed on the D means I can go fast it also means that it takes very little to mess those movements up. If my hands get too warm and slightly damp it means when I lift my finger just the smallest amount it isn't enough to sound the note change.

McIntyre's Farewell is coming on nicely - it really is a lovely tune. Maybe I'll record that this weekend.