Aethionema - Stonecress: Thanks for your email about College of Piping Skype lessons this year, and Happy New Year! Aspirations for playing the Scottish Small Pipes this year, Learning in online lessons, Bagpiping Schools at WUaS

Hi Lorne,

Thanks for your email about College of Piping Skype lessons this year, and Happy New Year!

In terms of aspirations, I'd like to focus on playing Scottish small pipes this year (a set of Walsh's, which I've just received), and playing for Scottish Country Dancing and dancers ... (including converting SCD sheet music in PDF, using MuseScore probably, into piping tunes, and vice versa, which doesn't quite work yet in MuseScore on the Mac) ... with other musicians on both A and D chanters, and playing beautifully (both you and Stuart Liddell inspired and informed) and beautiful tunes, and possibly beginning to record and release something comparable to a CD online (in Google + Hangouts or on Youtube?), for learning reasons, and building on your teachings as well as these tunes from my blog posts from last year, as well - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2013/11/scottish-raptors-bagpipe-playing-and.html (by the way, you're in a video in this blog entry from November 2013:) as well as these here - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2013/09/red-grouse-tunes-ideas-and-plans-for.html.

I think I have one lesson left from 2014, and have booked for this Thursday, Jan 8, at 8pm British Isles' time, which should be noon Pacific Time, if that still works.

I'm posting an updated version of my holiday letter for you as well here -

Asiatic lion: Happy Holidays, and Poetry from 2014, too!

http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2014/12/asiatic-lion-happy-holidays-and-poetry.html

Thank you.

Cheers,

Scott

*

In learning the Scottish Small Pipes, I learned up the following in my lesson yesterday with Lorne (which I wrote down in the Skype text area at the end of our lesson) -

[1/14/15 12:20:01 PM] Scott MacLeod: open bellows 100 %
[1/14/15 12:20:23 PM] Scott MacLeod: put drones over tube and even over collarbone if possible
[1/14/15 12:20:58 PM] Scott MacLeod: tie bellows with belts to chest and arm fairly tightly and snug everything so there's no play between arm or chest
[1/14/15 12:21:39 PM] Scott MacLeod: use chanter first by itself before drones (using a cork in the drone stock if possible) to get feel for playing the chanter alone, and without losing too much air ...

... and explore the subtle breath dance between the bellows and the bag {not to be too New Agey} :)

May add this here -

Scottish smallpipes and borderpipes' wiki subject page / school at WUaS ...
http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Scottish_smallpipes_and_borderpipes

Bagpiping Schools at WUaS - all wiki ...

http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Bagpipe_Tutorials#World_University_and_School_Links