Pipehacker Tip: Create Your Bagpipe Practice Infographic

Posted on | January 26, 2012 | by Vince Janoski | No Comments

Do you know what it is you spend your time on? Previously, I’ve talked about treating your bagpiping like finance and money and taking stock of your intangible assets. Well, also like finance, you also must take stock of your spending if you are to see where your money goes.

Like money, time is an asset that must be budgeted and managed. How are you spending your practice time? It stands to reason that the things you work on the most will be the things that improve the quickest. Likewise, you might be frustrated by how slowly some things develop or improve, if they do at all. Small bits of time spent on the right things pertaining to your music can add up and pay off big. Likewise, time NOT spent on the areas you need to improve also adds up and becomes a deficit that is more difficult to overcome.

The objective is to discover how you spend your bagpipe practice time in order to strengthen the musical areas in need of most improvement while maintaining stronger areas that are already going well. But how do you figure that out? Sometimes a picture tells the whole story.

The Tip

Keep track of your practice time this week and document in detail how much of it was spent and on what specifically. Create an infographic—that is, a handy chart or picture or table—that clearly illustrates the time spent. Create a clever system of images to depict the amount of time you spend on individual aspects of your playing. For example, you can use images of chanter reeds to illustrate the amount of time spent with a chanter reed for every minute or five minutes spent on an area of music. You can change the size of the image to reflect either a large amount of time or small amount of time, whatever works. Mark down the thing you worked on and use an image to illustrate how much time you spent on it. (Some suggestions are posted below. Feel free to download and use.) In a week’s time, you will have a clear idea of where you are spending most of your time, and where the deficits lay. Once it is all illustrated, it should become clear where time can be gathered and added or moved around to other aspects of your bagpiping. Your immediate goals for your bagpiping should also suddenly become very clear.

We all have a tendency to gravitate toward the things that are comfortable and easy. In our bagpiping, we might not realize that we are spending less time on the hard stuff simply because it feels better to spend time on the things that come a bit easier. But to have truly productive practice will require a focussed approach to specific aspects of your music. Improvement will come with deliberate effort and a clear illustration of your progress, something you can follow and track. I know a great book that is perfect for documenting such progress.

(Late) Morning Comix: PIPRZ

Posted on | January 24, 2012 | by Vince Janoski | No Comments

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Small Tunes Podcast: “The Witch’s Stane”

Posted on | January 20, 2012 | by Vince Janoski | No Comments

This moving and poignant slow march appears in only one place in print as near as I could discover, and that is in the J & R Glen Collection, first published in 1870. The witch’s stane mentioned in the title is a small stone that stands in the garden of a cottage in the western Scottish village of Dornoch, north of Inverness. It commemorates the 1722 execution of Janet Horne, convicted of witchcraft and said to be the last witch burned in Scotland. The event was powerful enough to inspire all sorts of music and literature of the time. The tune is a stirring piece of music given the simplicity of its phrasing. A multi-verse poem by the poet and musician Robert Mauchline (posted below) captures the feeling about the place. Listen to the podcast for more background and a playing of the tune on the bagpipe.

THE WITCH’S STANE: A LEGEND OF DORNOCH
by Robert Mauchline (b.1846)

Mark yonder wild spot where the grey mossy cairn
Its gloomy shade casts on the black sullen tarn,
Where the flow’rets are withered, and blasted the heath,
And Nature is wrapped in the silence of death.
“Tis a spot to be shunned; e’en the bold mountaineer
Shrinks back from its shadow with awe and with fear,
And nought but the hemlock and deadly wolfsbane
Grows rank by the cairn of the grey Witch’s Stane.

See yon pale, wan creature, by misery bowed,
Dragged forth to her doom by the murderous crowd,
With wild maniac gaze on the throng she looks round,
As her poor shrinking form to the dread stake is bound;
The faggots are gathered, the stake towers high,
And fierce roar the flames as they leap to the sky,
While her cries rise on high in a sad plaintive strain,
Where now towers the silent and grey Witch’s Stane.

“Farewell, glorious sun! thou bright lord of the morn,
Farewell to the land where my fathers were born;
To mountain and valley a long, long farewell,
To bright wimpling streamlet and sweet mossy dell,
Farewell to the glen where, a maiden, I roved
With Ronald the gallant, the winsome and loved;
He fell with the noble Dundee ‘mid the slain,
But his spirit looks down on the grey Witch: a Stane.”

“Ay, pile up the faggot, and fan the bright blaze,
Ay, demons of fury, rejoice as ye gaze,
Let my poor smouldering ashes to fierce winds be given,
But the deed shall be seen and recorded in heaven.
The heath shall be withered, the grass still ungrown,
Where this poor heart of mine shall be quivering thrown,
And the ban of your victim for ever remain
On th’unhallowed spot marked by the grey Witch’s Stane.”

But high rose the tumult, and loud the fierce hum,
With shrill sound of pipe and of hoarse rolling drum
That drowned her low wails, while the red embers plowed,
And her ashes by wild blasts were scattered and strewed.
And oft ‘mid the storm and the lightning’s blue sheen
The spirit of poor hapless Elsie is seen;
And there desolation for ever doth reign,
Nor breezes of spring kiss the grey Witch’s Stane.

“The Witch’s Stane”

Small Tunes: Vintage Melodies from the Bagpipe Tradition 004 The Witch's Stane [ 4:57 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (247)

Morning Comix: PIPRZ

Posted on | January 16, 2012 | by Vince Janoski | No Comments

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Confucius Schools Bagpipers

Posted on | January 13, 2012 | by Vince Janoski | No Comments

“Learn as though you would never be able to master it; Hold it as though you would be in fear of losing it.”

—Confucius

NY Times Publishes an Article on Music Learning on the Internet—With Bagpipes!

Posted on | January 11, 2012 | by Vince Janoski | No Comments

Wait, I think I just saw a pig sprout wings! I need another cup of coffee. Today’s NY Times features an article about distance learning on the internet that features not one, but two Highland bagpipe teachers doing such things! Jori Chisholm was one of the first, if not the first bagpipe teacher to offer online lessons via Skype. The article also speaks favorably of adult learners and gives an all around favorable spin to the whole experience. Even the eastern US’s own Donald Lindsay is mentioned! Read the whole thing.

“With Enough Bandwidth, Many Join the Band”

Assessing Your Intangible Bagpiping Assets

Posted on | January 11, 2012 | by Vince Janoski | No Comments

In the world of finance, assets are any resource, tangible and intangible, in your control, that can produce value. In the world of bagpiping, your assets would be anything you can access and use to produce music. The ultimate return or gain in this sense is playing good music on the bagpipe and anything that helps you do that can be considered an asset.

Tangible bagpiping assets are anything you can use right now. Your instrument, your technique, your reeds, your skill at performing; all of these are at your fingertips ready to go at a moment’s notice and can be seen and heard by others.

But what about your intangible assets? Your day-to-day schedule, your lifestyle, your mindset; all of these are also assets that factor in to your ability to make good bagpipe music.

We pipers spend a lot of time thinking about and working on our instruments and the finer points of music. Setting and working toward goals to refine these tangible assets are certainly beneficial. But it is the oftentimes ignored intangible assets that need to be assessed as well if you are to have success and achieve your goals.

Do you feel like you’re always shoehorning in practice time, and in some cases, skipping practice entirely? It could be that you need to take stock of your daily schedule to find out why that is. All of us will always have times where there are just too many priorities that need attention and bagpipe practice will get pushed lower on the list. But if it happens often, you would do well to review how you use your time for all the things in your life. If bagpiping is important to you, it is worth budgeting your time much like you would budget your finances to find where you really have it, or figure out what needs to change in order to create it. Be honest, how much time do you spend on Facebook? And, as much as I would love it if you spent loads of time reading this blog, how much time do you spend on the internet in general? It might be fun to dig through posts on newsgroups, but you know as well as I do that it is a timesink too. Little bits of time like that can add up to an entire practice session.

Does fitting in a solo competition appearance or pipe lesson always feel forced, like it’s a radical shift in your life, creating more complications? In addition to the time spent practicing bagpipes, there is time to actually perform/compete or obtain instruction. Take stock of your lifestyle: how busily you run from moment to moment; what you fill your time with; how you tackle the daily events of life. You might find the need to make small changes in order to get the most out of this additional time. You might see the need to scale back on things or simplify an overstuffed, overcomplicated lifestyle. Some of this comes down to planning and scheduling but at the heart of it is an objective assessment of how you live day to day. For example, if you wish to compete at one or several Highland games in future weekends on the calendar, there will likely be some life adjustments you can put in motion now so that those times transition smoothly and fit in to the grander scheme of things. You might have the need to work extra hours in advance for early travel on a Friday, for example. You may need to employ tricks to simplify house chores or mundane tasks so you have the energy, time, and focus for extra activity. I recently purchased An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. The main thrust is how to simplify your approach to your cooking so that it is more efficient and enjoyable. Great advice for just about everything, not just food.

How often do you feel good or confident about your bagpipe playing? Your mindset or attitude is perhaps the greatest of your intangible bagpiping assets. It determines the successes you have when working with your tangible assets and determines how you deal with failure as well. Assessing your attitude is a trickier task but not as hard as you might think. If you had to tell someone right now how you feel about your bagpiping, what would you say? A overly negative response might be a signal that you are literally sabotaging your efforts by setting up negative routines and setting yourself up for bad results. That is something that you might need to change. If you are asked to give an opinion about the bagpiping of a fellow competitor(s), what would you say? Here again, a pointless negative answer shows that your regard for others and their efforts may be masking similar attitudes about your own playing. How you regard others also reflects your general feeling about this bagpiping thing as a whole. If it is really important to you and you truly derive pleasure from it, your response would take on a different color. Yes, many pipers are in need of improvement (aren’t we all?). But there is a vast difference between saying “That performance was crap!” and saying “That piper really needs to work on their technique.”

Morning Comix: PIPRZ

Posted on | January 9, 2012 | by Vince Janoski | No Comments

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