Score Sheet Freak Out (Trust Your Teacher)

For those of you who live in a part of the world where judges of solo piping competitions provide score or, “crit”(icism), sheets, or some kind of recorded adjudicator performance comment, you may especially relate to this …
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DDD: George Stewart McLennan

Here’s something you may not have known about the great piper and composer (“The Little Cascade”), George Stewart McLennan (1883-1929):
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The Secret to Making Good Music: “This Boy Needs More Practice”

Just so there’s no suspense on this one; the secret to making good music is simple: It’s practice.

We’re coming up to the bagpipe competition season and everyone who aims to seriously take part is hard at it trying to make the best music they can.
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Australia’s Funniest Home Videos

After Saturday’s Toronto Indoor Games and a late night on the D-town I was out and about at the crack of dawn today helping a film-maker friend shoot the famous Paris to Ancaster bike race [N.B. must say, I’m quite proud of myself for having tip-toed out of the house without stirring couch-surfing band members].
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The Blog’s Fifth Anniversary

April will mark the fifth anniversary of this blog. I never planned to “blog”, or write about stuff and post it online, but Yoann Le Goff, the technical brains behind dunaber.com, pitched me the idea, then built the site and, well, the rest just happened. I came across an online study the other day (so definitely not scientific) and it seems something like 60-80% of all blogs that are started are abandoned after one month. Whatever. I’m surprised I’ve lasted five years doing this.
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A Leap Year Thought

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment;
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1950s Tenor Drummer

Here’s a neat whisky advert from the 1950s: a tenor drummer in full flight – both flourishing and sounding the drum, too.
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Log Driver’s Waltz

Here’s a nice sample of Canadian folk music – or a kind of a Canadian folk music: Wade Hemsworth’s bouncy, cheerful “Log Driver’s Waltz”. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1979 this little “vignette” as the NFB calls it, has become an iconic bit of Canada’s cultural flotsam and jetsam.
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It’s Free! Michael Grey Book 5: Music for Everyone

Here you go: my fifth book of music, “Music for Everyone”. First published in 2006.
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Change

You may know I’m a big fan of interesting quotes, proverbs and assorted bits of trivia…who isn’t?
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