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 […]
By MICHAEL GREY. Let’s get this over with at the start – the boiler plate line from almost any positive review of a book that lands in the orbit of the piping world: the “new edition” of William Donaldson’s Pipers: A Guide to the Players and Music of The Great […]
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 […]
Review by Chris MacKenzie • Great White Records, GWR008CD. Those of a certain vintage will remember the days where there were regular releases of solo piping recordings, featuring the piper playing a formulaic repertoire of marches, some hornpipes and jigs and, of course, a piobaireachd. These days, the truly solo recording […]
The Campbell Letters – Letters of James Campbell and of his father, Archibald Campbell of Kilberry. Edited by Malcolm McRae By RODDY LIVINGSTONE. When I was asked to review this book, it is fair to say I only accepted the task with some reluctance. The reasons for this were perhaps […]
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 […]
