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No, you’re not going to find bagpipe hints, playing tips, or tune instruction. Any improvement in your music begins with improvement in yourself. Like expanding your tune repertoire, you can expand your self-improvement repertoire as well.
Are there any pipers left who remember the days of leather blowstick flapper valves? The little circles of old bag leather that dried up and had to be gnawed back to life in order to function? No? Well, once upon a time pipers had to make their own flapper valves to tie on to their blowpipes.
What is the most difficult aspect of learning bagpipes or pipe band drumming? It’s not the music and it’s not playing or maintaining the instrument. It is practicing or, building the habits to practice.
Be sure you caught the first part of this series – the LICK, posted last week. Next, we move on to the chanter-reed-pinch – possibly the most misunderstood…
Back in the day, the gooey black bits of “cobbler’s wax” were oftentimes a melted mess in a piper’s maintenance kit awaiting their next turn at a strand of hemp. What is simply globs of pine resin and pitch (otherwise known by the scientific name “soot”), the stuff was crumbly, sticky, and infuriating at the same time but has always been ideal for sticking that first wrap of hemp on your pipe tenons. But what do you do when your chunk of black wax has crumbled to nothing?
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