Piper, teacher, reed maker, judge and all-around bon vivant, Colin has spent a lifetime around bagpipes. While he’s the son of a piping legend in Captain John A, he’s done the business and won the big piping prizes — and much more. In his life he has been a living […]
Tag: Piping Today Magazine
Opinions, assumptions and truths
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #65, 2013. Summertime and the livin’ is easy; fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high. Great words; in fact, great lyrics from George and Ira Gershwin. And while it’s our standard holiday season, with weather that’s light on the back, summer isn’t […]
‘Big Ronnie’ bridges the generations
Ronald Lawrie of Oban (1927-2008) wasn’t called ‘Big Ronnie’ for nothing. But his broad-shouldered, 6ft 5in frame and imposing, square-jawed presence were almost incidental to his considerable stature in piping — and an involvement that began with direct influences from the 19th century and continues into the 21st century. He […]
Tim Cummings: tunes based on a ‘gapped’ A scale
Theory Top-Up by Tim Cummings Piping Today #73, 2014. When people refer to musical scales, they are normally referring to the conventional major or minor, seven-note, “diatonic” scales. If you’ve been following the recent Piping Today articles on music theory, you’ll know that seven-note scales can also be something other […]
Tunes in the key of A-Major
Theory Top-Up by Tim Cummings Piping Today #72, 2014. This article is the third in an on-going series focusing on specific musical keys found in our Scottish piping repertoire. Having already looked at the two most common musical keys in our light music, D-Major and A-Mixolydian, we’ll now put a […]
The real life of Mike Katz
While not cut from the cloth of the competitive piper, Mike Katz is one of the world’s most successful American-born pipers. Born in the Los Angeles region of the San Fernando Valley, he broke his piping teeth in his older brother Steve’s high school pipe band – along with a […]
Flashbulb memories
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #64, 2013. It’s an uncomfortable truth that any sentence that starts with “One of my earliest memories…” will induce in any person — outside of maybe a Freudian psychoanalyst — a vacant stare, a droop of the eye lids and just enough open-mouthed […]
Tunes in the key of A-Mixolydian
Theory Top-Up by Tim Cummings Piping Today #71, 2014. In the last issue of Piping Today, we took a close look at the key of D-Major. That article was the first of what will be a series designed to supplement previous articles1 that painted broader pictures of multiple musical keys2. […]
Two heads are better than one
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #63, 2013. It’s said that every day we each make thousands of decisions. Starting from the moment we wake up: do we get out of our chariots or roll over? And then: if we decide we want to eat, what’s for brekkie, what […]
Bearskin hats and pristine spats
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey Piping Today #62, 2013. I was at lunch with a work friend the other day when the subject came up: just how old is the general public’s idea of the stereotypical pipe band? You know, Scotland the Brave, Black Bear, Green Hills and yards and […]