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, […]
Alastair Campbell, the former Downing Street Press Secretary and Official Spokesperson to Prime Minister Tony Blair, has made a plea for the Ukrainian national anthem to be played on the Highland pipes when Scotland’s national football team meets Ukraine. The game will take place at Hampden Park on June 1 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Tim Cummings Piping Today #78, 2015. In this Theory Top-Up series, we have already explored the nine specific musical keys that are most commonly found in our Highland pipe repertoire. My best guess is we’ve covered approximately 95% of our repertoire in this way. There’s not much left but […]
By Tim Cummings Piping Today #77, 2015. Having already investigated tunes in the keys of A-Major, D-Major, B-minor, A-Mixolydian, as well as tunes that are pentatonic, “gapped”, and those considered to have a “double-tonic”, we have now covered approximately 90% of the Scottish pipe tune repertoire in this Top-Up series. […]
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 […]
US piper, Tim Cummings has released an interesting new album. The Birds’ Flight is the culmination of several years’ worth of collaboration between Tim and Pete Sutherland (fiddle, song), and Brad Kolodner (banjo). The Vermont-based composer and multi-instrumentalist has included traditional pipe tunes restyled as Appalachian-style hoedowns and waltzes. Tim […]
We received, surprisingly, quite a few correct answers to yesterday’s April Fool’s Day riddle, pictured above. Thomas MacKenzie of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada, was first with the correct answer to Tim Cummings’ clever musical cyrptogram. The answer is: Cabbage, Aged Beef, a Bad Egg – Egad!(Dad added decaf café) […]
