You hum it....

I sat down today with a tune clear in my mind. It's still there. I am pretty sure it is Castle Dangerous, which I've had nothing whatsoever to do with for months. I vaguely thought it began with a throw on D, so began there and went straight in to My Home Town and then various other of the usual suspects, plus the tunes still being worked on, where I wondered if the Cudgel ought to come before the Pickle or whether they actually didn't belong together at all. But Castle Dangerous, or whatever it is, would not come...

I'm not sure why that tune is in my head. I was expecting any stray tune to be Teribus, having read yesterday about the Common Riding at Howick, where Teribus is apparently their local anthem (but whether they are the same Teribus I know not).

Wondering when I might last have played Castle it occurred to me that it would be useful to tag all my tunes and as I have - as I have so often mentioned - endless spare hours in the day and nothing to fill them with, I think I'll do just that.

Updated to add - scrap that. Turns out there is a limit on total characters for all tags and I've exceeded it with the first half dozen tunes. :-( I guess I could make a post to link to each tune mention....

The best of times, the worst of times

In some ways this was a really bad month to choose to play every day. To add to the expected busy period at work I had some stuff that can crop up at any time and of course would  choose the busy period in which to appear, plus something big and totally unexpected and very time consuming also appeared. This means I've been tired, cross, headachy and stressed out and the last thing I've needed when I got home has been more stuff to do.

It’s also peak allotment season with courgettes needing to be harvested every other day, sweet peas ditto, and things needing to be watered  most days.

On the positive side the piping has proved a huge stress release at the end of the day, providing I've not been too tired. The fan’s workload starts to ease off a little this month so he’s been more able to step in and do some cooking. The plot really only need s attention every other day. And the knitting season is dead on its feet: just one paltry pair of socks started in April and finished this weekend. Normally that’s maybe two weeks’ worth of knitting at most. 

I've started another project, but it will take no time at all to do. This is partly driven by a deadline (it’s for a forthcoming baby and has to be handed over before the mother-to-be leaves work) and partly just by the fun of it: one of my favourite things to knit and takes no time at all.

As ever when I get to the end of a month of intense playing I feel a mix of relief and regret. The relief is that I will have time to do other things, and that I will be able to choose when to play rather than feeling it’s another target for the day. Regret because I will miss playing every day, and because I never do as much, learn as much, improve as much as I hope to during these months. 

There will be others – am penciling in September.

Pleased as Punch

The fan says I'm doing really well, sounding fluent, putting on a spurt of speed. I must be pleased, he says. But I can only think of all the other times when he has said nice things, or I've felt I've improved, and yet here I still am, with a long long list of things I want to do better. Better gracing, better bellows control, better switching between chanters, faster learning of tunes, bigger repertoire. I don't feel very pleased at all, really.

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.



Check this out on Chirbit

Out, damned dots

I meant to entitle this post "damned if you do" but once I thought of this it was too good to resist...

I've been working hard at Braemar. I've really struggled with the repeated FAFs. They go long, short, standard and I kept wanting to play them as short, long, standard. Still, I kept working away and eventually turned them round. And then the fan said it sounded very good except there were some Scotch snaps I  was apparently missing.

Que? Scotch snaps - short, long, standard. Ah yes, I remembered them well... The fan looked at the dots and confirmed I was playing as written i.e. wrong.

So this evening I've been trying to unlearn my careful learning and switch round the long and shorts. I'm getting the hang of the A then D grace on C business, but where the C is the first note of a "snap" (there are two that go CDA) it's adding to the chaos. Almost wish I'd never bothered with the dots at all....

Oh, go on then

I wasn't going to play this evening. It seems that now the pressure is (finally) easing off at work I feel more tired than ever. All I wanted to do this evening was curl up with a book, leaving the allotment unwatered and not even bothering to start a new knitting project to take to my knitting group tomorrow. Well, the plot will have to stay dry tonight, but I've dragged my project out to cast on and I've done some piping.

My hands were cold and my pipes sounded odd to me. The fan says they sounded fine to him. It's like those mysterious days when the car seems to sound growly or rattly for no particular reason. Or the mysterious way in which 19 degrees (the standard temperature in the flat over the year) can seem blissfully cool in summer but unbearably cold in winter.

I worked on the Braemar Gathering, sticking to the first two parts and reading the dots rather than using them as a guide to the shape of things while I play what I think the tune sounds like. I don't know the tune well enough.

(As an aside I was thinking of The Session and the insistence there on the purity - even moral superiority - of playing by ear and thinking of all those great pipe tunes I have the dots for and perhaps will never hear anyone else play in my entire life, let alone hear often enough to learn...)

But, round and round with the A and B, working on timing, trying to throw in D grace wherever low A moves to C. It's a nice movement and ought to be simple enough. I played a few other bits and pieces but nothing sounded right or felt comfortable, and I almost wish I hadn't bothered at all.

Lost and found

The fan is back. I've retrieved the first part of the Cudgel, and the dots.

I lost two more days of my month. On Saturday I kept waiting for phone updates from the fan , stranded in Basel awaiting a replacement plane. On Sunday I was just too darned tired.

Today as I went through dots to find the Pickle, Cudgel, Troy, Whaling and Braemar I came across the Shetland Fiddler, Alick C and the Snuff Wife and wondered about giving them another go, but (wisely, hopefully) I stuck to what I had.

I still don't really have Troy, after all this time. The bits that work well fly from my fingers, but then I stumble over a grace and the edifice crumbles. I had the Whaling Song, but keep conflating the B part with that of the Cabot Trail. The fan tells me this means I don't really know the Whaling Song. I've listened to it again and introduced some snaps which I hope will differentiate it in my mind from the Trail. Braemar  is tricky on timing.

Played for fun this evening: Magersfontein, Bee, Flett and Dargai.