A Beginner’s Guide • By John Slavin. If you have followed part one and part two of this series you should now understand the importance of playing a concert pitch B-flat chanter, and the following points summarise the other important aspects covered in the previous features. Your low A sounds […]
A Beginner’s Guide • By John Slavin. The first part of this feature focused on the basics of setting up your pipe chanter to allow you to tune to concert pitch when playing with other musicians, and to recap the main points: you must have a concert pitch B-flat pipe […]
A Beginner’s Guide • By John Slavin. THE GREAT Highland Bagpipe is a versatile instrument capable of producing breathtaking music in the hands of the finest solo performers and Grade 1 bands, or of stirring the emotions of the listener when a pipe band parades down the street with a […]
Harmony Writing Part Three. By TIM CUMMINGS Piping Today #87, 2017. Two articles ago, I lied to you: after describing the primitive harmony of the drone (or ‘pedal point’), I promised to discuss the harmony of chords in the very next part. And then I didn’t. That’s because in the […]
Harmony Writing Part Two. By TIM CUMMINGS Piping Today #86, 2017. In the last instalment of this column on music theory, we began looking at the most primitive, basic form of harmony that I could think of: the drone, or ‘pedal point’. Of course, droning is what most bagpipes do […]
Harmony Writing Part One. By TIM CUMMINGS Piping Today #85, 2017. We have, in this Theory Top-Up series, covered a range of topics related to the music of Scottish-style bagpipes (among other bagpipes and non-bagpipes). We have examined practically every major, minor and modal key used in our repertoire, and […]
By TIM CUMMINGS Piping Today #84, 2017. In the last two Theory Top-Up articles, I shamelessly — shamelessly — manufactured an analogy comparing subtle flavour overtones in beer to the overtones (harmonics) in music. I went even further in the most recent issue and asked our beleaguered editor to insert […]
By TIM CUMMINGS Piping Today #83, 2016. In the previous article of this series, I tried my best to introduce the phenomenon of harmonics in musical sound. And in an effort to keep the discussion accessible to non-physicists — myself included — I first compared harmonics to something more familiar: […]
By TIM CUMMINGS Piping Today #82, 2016. When you come across the word “harmonics”, do mysteriously inconspicuous high notes come to mind, the ones that some people claim they can hear embedded in the sound of drones, and that are apparently used to more finely tune their instrument? If so, […]
By TIM CUMMINGS Piping Today #81, 2016. In the previous round of this Theory Top-Up series, we began to look at familiar tunes whose original melodies spanned beyond the nine-note range of the standard Scottish pipe chanter. The word ‘compression’ was introduced as a way of describing the process of […]
