Review by Chris MacKenzie • Greentrax Recordings, CDTRAX411 The first fifty four seconds of Kyle Warren’s Relentless CD sets down a marker, that what follows will not be a gentle stroll through piping’s gently verdant pastures. Instead, it discombobulates you into thinking you have slipped Megadeath into the CD. Slowly […]
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: […]
ON THIS DAY in June 2006, Michael Grey released Shimla Hum on his own label, Dunaber Music. The album was reviewed in Piping Today #23. If you missed it first time around, or if you are just as youngster and haven’t researched as far back as 2006, then it is still available on […]
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, […]
ON THIS DAY in May 2008, Greentrax Recordings released A Celebration of the Music of Gordon Duncan. It’s an album full of sparkling traditional music, including the fabulous Anada Pa Gael from the pipes of José Manuel Tejedor and the fiddle of Duncan Chisholm. The article below was published in […]
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 […]
THE ROKE CD Review by Stuart Milne. Piping Today #100, 2020. Ross Miller is a great example of what it means to be a modern piper. As Ross explains in the sleeve notes to his debut solo album, The Roke, his early musical background was purely in pipe bands (formerly Peoples […]
REVIEW by PETER McCALISTER This year, for the first time, the annual competition held by the Lowland & Border Pipers’ Society (LBPS) was held in Linlithgow, at the historic Burgh Halls. This marvellous old building has been re-purposed with meeting rooms and a café – and the acoustics are superb. […]
By TIM CUMMINGS Piping Today #80, 2016. Because there are only nine melodic notes available on a typical Scottish chanter, piping students become aware of the limitations of our instrument pretty early on in their piping careers. Inevitably, the moment arrives when they realise that the entirety of the Braveheart […]
By Tim Cummings Piping Today #79, 2016. For nearly two years this Theory Top-Up series has been exploring specific musical keys in our piping repertoire. We’ve covered about 10 different specific keys, and in doing so explored the tonal foundations of perhaps 96% of our repertoire. So what’s left? About […]
