Adopt Your Piping Power Pose! by Vince Janoski

Body language can shape who you are. What kind of piper do you want to be? It might just start with how you stand and how you present yourself to your audience. When we walk up to the judge, are you comparing your past performances as an indicator of how you will do now? Chances [...]

What You Need to be a Better Bagpiper by Vince Janoski

Where do you want to go with your bagpiping? Have you ever asked yourself this? It’s a fair question and one that might make you uncomfortable to think about. We tend to be stuck in the present when it comes to piping. Cramming on tunes, hammering your repertoire, all keep us focussed on what we [...]

5 Ways to Set Better Bagpiping Goals by Vince Janoski

The beginning of the new year is always the perfect time to assess where you are in your bagpiping. Goal setting is a ubiquitous start-of-year activity that benefits lots of folks, and bagpipers are not exempt. Sometimes though, the act of setting the goals themselves can be a daunting task. You know what you need [...]

Pipehacker Tip: Create Your Bagpipe Practice Infographic by Vince Janoski

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 [...]

Pipehacker Tip: Tracking Your Practice by Vince Janoski

Time is a valuable thing. Given the demands of everyday living, it is often hard to fit in the full amount of time one needs for good practice. An active solo competing piper can reach a point where he or she is developing and polishing 15 or more separate pieces of music. A band player [...]

5 Steps to Building Your Bagpipe Music Repertoire by Vince Janoski

Developing one’s musicianship as a solo bagpiper or pipe bandsman can be hard work, and it’s easy to fall back on the competitive music that demands so much of our time to polish. But, as musicians, we owe it to ourselves to develop a broader view.

4 Steps for Getting Your Drone Reeds to “Point Zero” by Vince Janoski

“Point zero” is exactly what it implies. It is setting the strength of your drone reeds at the starting point before you begin adjusting for pitch and chanter reed strength.

5 Tips to Get You Searching Bagpipe Tunes With Purpose by Vince Janoski

We pipers love the latest and greatest music produced by our favorite soloists and pipe bands, don’t we? We want to play the same exciting stuff we hear. This impulse inevitably leads us on a search for the scores of said tunes. Unfortunately, these half-hearted searches lead many to internet forums asking others where it [...]