Harmony Writing Part Eight. By TIM CUMMINGS. Piping Today #92, 2018. We have arrived at the eighth and last article on writing harmonies for pipe bands and other pipe ensembles — for the time being, at least. In the previous seven articles, we explored a progression of approaches to crafting […]
Harmony Writing Part Seven. By TIM CUMMINGS. Piping Today #91, 2018. If you’ve ever heard a world-class uilleann piper, you’ll have experienced both the thrill of a magnificent instrument as well as the accompanying harmonies played on the regulators. Uilleann pipes are similar to Scottish-style bagpipes in that they have […]
Harmony Writing Part Six. By TIM CUMMINGS. Piping Today #90, 2018. Those of you following along with this mini-series on Harmony Writing may remember the project from the previous article, which involved developing a more involved harmony for the first part of John Walsh’s The Korgi (a reel in the […]
Harmony Writing Part Four. By TIM CUMMINGS Piping Today #88, 2017. In part three of this mini-series on Harmony Writing, we looked at the most common basic chords used to accompany Celtic music, in particular Scottish pipe tunes. A chart of the nine most common chords, most of them consisting […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
