Thank You / Gracias / Merci / Tapadh leibh / Grazie

A rare and wonderful thing happened yesterday. At Georgetown highland games we saw a most deserving public thank-you [understatement].
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Making Music

Everyone’s always looking for the “secret“: how do I make music happen?

Making great music is a different story, but good music, to make good music? That’s a horse of a different colour.
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Practice Practice Practice

I was pretty much without bagpipes for the month of April. I play McCallum bagpipes, as some of you may know, and decided to take Kenny MacLeod up on his offer to have them refurbished. I’ve worked with Kenny and Stuart McCallum for years (the two who lead the McCallum Bagpipe enterprise) and have been an early and enthusiastic supporter of their efforts to make great bagpipes happen in Ayrshire. In fact, the set I play today is the first silver and “ivory” set the company made. So there you go.
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A Comparative Look at Pipe Band Ensemble

Here’s a copy of the slides I used in the talk I presented at the Pipers’ & Pipe Band Society of Ontario’s annual adjudictor’s seminar, March 21, 2011, in Milton, Ontario.
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Copyright this Way

A week or so ago I led a talk at the annual judge’s meeting of the Pipers’ & Pipe Band Society of Ontario. The day’s always a good one. At the very least it’s a great gathering of old friends and acquaintances and at it’s best its a really insightful exchange of ideas and perspectives.

Anyway, my bit was a comparative look at pipe band ensemble. I checked out competitive orchestras – yes, they do compete – American high school concert bands and British brass bands. I learned a lot in my seeking out of information related to other competitive musical worlds. For instance, I can now tell you with great certainty that it’s scarily, freakishly and jaw-droppingly amazing how close the British brass band world mirrors that of the pipe band. Maybe a blab for another day.
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Advice from Jimi Hendrix

I have to admit I’m not one of those blindly obsessed Jimi Hendrix fans. Not even close. Guitar players tend to worship him – especially electric guitarists. I do appreciate his musicianship, though. Absolutely [I’m sure Jimi is sighing with relief amongst his rock and roll angels].

But his stuff, unlike, say, Cathy-Ann MacPhee’s, is not what I listen to; it’s not music that tends to make my day – or night – better. And we all know music has that magical power…if directed to the right ears.

But just because someone hasn’t dialled in to your music, well, that doesn’t make it any less great.
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Responsibilities of Membership

I came across a note recently where a person was enquiring about membership in a band. They were interested in this band because they wanted to “get better”. This person needed the band “to kick their arse” so that they’d play better, be better.

I thought this strange. I thought this person had the whole thing backwards.
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Ceci n’est pas une Bagpipe

The world is full of surreal moments. We sometimes catch them, see them, live them and take them in and we’re almost always better for it. And sometimes we’re oblivious to the thought-provoking charms of the surreal around us. The surreal moment: that dream-like, unexpectedly fantastical and completely out of context with what we expect from our usual here-and-now.
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A Healthy Band: It’s About Feeling Good

We’re entering the time of year (in the northern hemisphere, at least) where pipe bands experience a drop in consistently good attendance. For as long as I have played in bands this has been a truth. From January through to March a good whack of the band, a sizable group of people (usually the same), fail to attend, or attend sporadically, due to “busy-ness” – or whatever. Excuses are legion and, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker [she of “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”], they run the gamut from A to B. The reasons may be unique to those “busy” but to core membership – and every band has a hardcore group of members that keep the ship afloat – they bore.
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Those Who Can, Teach

The world’s population is roughly 6,697,254,041. Of those people, I figure, based on what I know, what I’ve read and what I sense to be true (so we’re talking science here) there’s about 100,000 of us Great Highland Bagpipers (GHBs).

And what’s that percentage? GHBs represent about 0.0014931492726393354 of the world’s population. More or less.

Should pipers feel vulnerable? I think I really refer to the pipe and not the piper so, I put it this way: is the playing of the GHB an at-risk art form?
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