By Tim Cummings Piping Today #76, 2015. Imagine for a moment that it’s February in the North Country, and you’ve been invited to a friend’s sauna. You enter into the thick, steamy, blanketing air of the sauna, which in midwinter feels absolutely wonderful, rapidly softening petrified muscles that have been […]
John Mulhearn explained the technical aspects of learning the light and the heavy D throw on day six of the February Piping Challenge. The video can be found on The National Piping Centre’s Facebook page here. On day seven Wilson Brown spoke all about 2/4 March playing, and stressed the […]
James Duncan Mackenzie had a busy and creative lockdown. The Silver Medallist from Lewis, Scotland published this, his first collection, at the end of 2021 and he has just released his third solo-piping album, a recording that features music from the book. Too many collections produced these days contain page […]
I’ve long thought that Angus MacKay’s life would make for a great film. It has it all: sex, drugs (well, alcohol), rock n’ roll and a young death. Angus went from a childhood of poverty to an adolescence spent frequenting palaces and hobnobbing with the great and good of his […]
You get together with a group of your pipe band friends for a ‘pipe band’ trivia night. First question: Which Grade 1 pipe band won the World Championship in 1955 at Stirling, but was disqualified for playing the wrong MSR? Shotts and Dykehead Caledonia is the correct answer, with John […]
This recording was released a couple of days before the Glenfiddich and was made during lockdown by renowned Scottish multi-instrumentalist, Fraser Fifield. He also recorded, engineered and mastered it. At first glance, the title would suggest this is a recording devoted to ceòl mòr. It isn’t. Fifield refers to the […]
By Stuart Letford The Conundrum: International Piping Night, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, New Auditorium, Glasgow (January 25, 2019) The new auditorium of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, imaginatively called the, er, New Auditorium, was the venue for this multi-national line-up of pipers brought together by composer, flute player, piper, instructor, […]
Bagpipe Brothers by Kerry Sheridan was published in paperback in 2006. It’s taken three attempts for me to finish it. There are two reasons for this: 1) given its subject matter – the four pipe band members, all firemen, who played at the funeral of every colleague who perished in […]
By Stuart Letford and Dan Nevans Please accept our collective apology for this review having taken so long to write. This was because one of us has only just been released from the Southern General Hospital having had his sides stitched and the other one refused to come out from […]
In February 2020, for their appearance and tone, I bought a used set of silver and faux ivory 1980 Kintail bagpipes. I then spent months trying to bring that tone properly to the surface, where I could be confident that they would still be near in tune whenever I picked […]
