Tunes!

Okay, I think I can actually play a couple of tunes now. It's quite exciting to get to the point where I can go and have a crack at anything in Liestmann's section of introductory tunes and play them so that I can recognise that I'm playing more or less what's written on the page. It's about the same standard I was when I started having recorder lessons I think - only my actual ability to read music is significantly better now than it was then.

Whether my piping technique is actually up to that level or not is something entirely different though, it's quite possible that my increased musical literacy is covering up for that. There are times when my fingers just do the wrong thing, and there are a few moments when they start attempting recorder fingerings, although fortunately this doesn't happen very often because the whole feel of the instrument is completely different.

I think if I do continue with this piping business and get my own set though, I'd like one with a bit lower pitch. At about high F# and above, this set's rather shrill, and I've never liked playing hugely high instruments anyway, which is why I like treble and tenor recorders so much - and even treble goes a bit high really. Shame the bass isn't agile enough for some of the really good treble music, because being able to play it all an octave lower would suit me very well indeed.

But enough recorder ramblings. It may definitely be worthwhile investigating what it's like to play a D or C set.

Pressure stability?

Something approaching pressure stability is occurring in my piping. The drone's getting more constant, and I'm getting better at timing my use of the bellows to fill the bag at opportune moments. It seems - although this may turn out to be a delusion on my part or just a compensation for bad technique - that the way to go is to avoid refilling the bag on long chanter notes, because then any pressure fluctuation is significantly more audible than it is when the chanter's changing notes, partly because I'm also getting the hang of the idea that some notes seem to require slight pressure variations anyway.

That latter might be down to having a hire set of pipes that's presumably not in the best of condition, but given my experience with the recorder it seems that anything using a tube of differing lengths with discrete fingerings is going to require pressure variations to get the temperament right throughout the range.

Which perhaps answers why the high A is so sharp and unpleasant. Time will tell... that not's so extraordinarily unpleasant that I'm readily willing to believe in a minor chanter defect of some sort.

Tuning

I'm pretty dreadful at tuning. Sometimes I can hear when things are out of tune, sometimes I can't, and when I can I usually can't tell what's actually wrong - it just doesn't sound right. Oft-times playing in recorder groups I only realise that it was wrong when we get the tuning right and everything sounds great. At that point I think ah yes, that's what it's meant to sound like. Unfortuately I've not yet had much luck keeping the memory of that sound sufficiently fresh to let me do better in the next out-of-tune group. Even given a reference pitch to tune just me to, I still can't tell if I'm sharp or flat half the time, I just have to go up and down and see if I can hit the right spot.

Now while those days are slowly becoming less frequent (they still make up the majority, but I tune to the harpsichord much more quickly in my recorder lessons now), some days I revert completely to my pre-music-lessons self and am utterly, utterly awful. This morning I did it while I was playing the pipes.

I tuned my G drone, got everything nicely set with the chanter. Started to play. Everything sounded wrong. The drone note was utterly out of place, completely unrelated and disconnected to the tune I was just about managing to play. I tried mucking about with the pressure and got some improvement, but the irritating thing was that the drone still sounded (to my dodgy ears) to be in tune with both low and high Gs on the chanter.

Bizarrely, adding the high D drone to the mixture, something of an act of desperation, helped to reveal that there was indeed a problem, and the G drone was retuned to fit in. Then the D drone was retuned again... eventually I got something vaguely okay-sounding, but by this point I was tired and frustrated and my pressure control was all over the place.

I guess some days one just isn't meant to play. To ease the frustration I picked up a recorder and ran through a couple of Almands from a book of Renaissance dances. At least I can play something...

More noise isn't necessarily the same as progress

More noise can be fun, though. Yesterday I got around to playing again after a bit of a break with returning from my parents' after Christmas, and also after they came up and delivered my water manometer, which was far too large to take on the train with me. After a quick pressure check I unplugged the thing and decided to just try and play, and it worked out fairly well, although the same old problem with refilling the bag still manifests. This is to be expected, I'm sure.

I've also noticed that differing pressure has a very pronounced effect on the middle notes of the chanter. Particularly today I was finding that the middle D was going sharp at the slightest inclination, and by sharp I mean really sharp. However, once I figured out the cause I was able to keep some better control over it, and it usually only happened around bag filling time, where my pressure control is right out of the window anyway. That does seem to be the critical thing at the moment.

I also thought, just for fun, try opening up drone number two. I was playing simple pieces in G, so I had the low G drone going anyway. Opened up the high D drone and tuned it in (surprisingly easily, I must be getting a better ear or lower standards), then played for a bit. It was nice, but a little odd. Opening up the low D drone as well added a real depth and richness, although the bag empties at an alarming rate with three drones running.

I don't think I'm supposed to use the low D drone for G music, but I thought it sounded quite nice with some pieces. Presumably it'd work horrendously with others though... maybe today I just got lucky.

Pressure problems

My bag and bellows technique quite obviously sucks. While I can just about maintain a steady drone, when I start playing a tune all attempts to maintain a suitable constant pressure and keep the bag nicely full seem to fail, and inevitably things start to go horribly flat and out of tune. When I do manage to fill the bag up while playing, there's usually something of a pressure surge and so everything goes sharp for a moment, then flat as I realise what's happening and relax my bag arm, and then wavering somewhere back to the proper pitch as the bellows empty (and I direct one eye at the water manometer and see just how under pitch it's showing me to be).

It's a tad on the irritating side, especially when it comes as I'm starting to get the hang of playing the low keyed notes without causing strange squeaking noises.

Baby steps

What's pleasant about learning the pipes as a second instrument is that I don't have any problem reading the music. The range of a set of Northumbrian smallpipes isn't much more than two octaves if that (it rather depends on the design of the chanter, which varies), and it fits very comfortably into the range of notes which I'm already very able to read from treble clef due to my recorder experience.

The trick of course is matching those blobs on the page to fingers and keys on the chanter. The fingered notes aren't particularly difficult, it turns out. They progress nicely up the chanter, and each note requires only one hole to be exposed, so although the fingering system is odd, it's not taking me a great deal of time to get used to. What's really throwing me is the keys.

Fingered notes: lift the right finger, get a note.

Keyed notes: find the right key, press it with the right finger, get a note.

Okay so there are only two fingers to choose from for the keys - the left little finger and the right thumb, which are the only two digits unoccupied with finger holes. The problem is that on the nine-key chanter I've got, these fingers are together responsible for all nine keys - there are three positioned for the little finger, with the remaining six for the thumb. I'm quite pleased I don't have a seventeen-key chanter right now. They are fully chromatic over two octaves, which is useful to be sure, but the warnings that this doesn't mean you can play easily in any key make a lot of sense. You do not want to be playing most of your notes with just a little finger and a thumb, so it's always best to select music which fits in the range of the finger holes of the chanter as much as possible, especially if you want to play it fast.

The water manometer I mentioned in the first post has been tremendously helpful. Over the last couple of days I've had a few sessions and gained compliments from the family over my progress. I've attempted a few more tunes which are down as fairly easy in the Liestman book, and they do fit very nicely into the range of the instrument. Frere Jacque is quite obviously not an authentic Northumbrian tune - neither is Auld Lang Syne, although the latter is frequently played upon Scottish bagpipes. Both, however, aren't too difficult and help with the learning of the keys for low F#, E and D.

Then there are two proper Northumbrian tunes - Winster Gallop and Whittingham Green Lane. I have a recording of Kathryn Tickell playing the latter. Needless to say her version is far superior to mine! The bag is still presenting problems. If I didn''t have to worry about it I don't think the notes would be particularly difficult to deal with in these tunes, but I find myself forgetting to fill the bag, or overfilling it, and generally having difficulty maintaining a nice constant pressure while playing. This results in notes bending their pitch all over the place, and the result isn't pleasant.

Things to work on over the next few days: learn to refill the bag while playing a tune without mucking up the pitch and without stopping the tune until the bag's full.

And we're off - an introduction

The idea for this blog came over me as a bit of a mad impulse. I have no idea if it will be a success or if it will be interesting, useful or even if I will manage to sustain it beyond the first few posts. Despite this doubts, I do know that if I don't start, I won't ever get the chance to finish, so thanks to Google for providing such a wonderful free blogging service which allows me to indulge such whims without the effort of setting up another blog on my own server.

This blog is about my attempts to learn to play the Northumbrian smallpipes. A little background seems to be in order at this point.

I live in England, in the East Midlands. I'm a PhD student, and rely on my feet, my bicycle and public transportation to get around as I don't have a car. I'm male, single, twenty-four years old at the time of writing. I play the recorder to enough of a standard for me to enjoy myself and have some fun with some group playing - I recently passed my grade 5 treble recorder, and I play in a couple of groups and at the local Society of Recorder Players branch. I have recorder lessons every week and get on very well with my teacher.

But I wanted to take up another instrument.

Now, I love folk music. I also love early and baroque music, the latter being particularly well-covered by the recorder (and my teacher is a baroque specialist so I get to play plenty of it). For early music I can also play the recorder, or a few other instruments which are moderately learnable for a recorder player - such as the crumhorn, something else I intend to learn one day. Folk music, on the other hand, is generally played on other things - guitars, flutes, whistles, fiddles, drums and bagpipes feature quite prominently in various traditions.

I should note at this point that the more esoteric an instrument is, the more attractive it seems to be. The recorder is quite popular, but still often perceived as a toy instrument - probably by people scarred for life by poor experiences playing the descant recorder at primary school. It's not a toy instrument, and there are a lot of recorder players about. It doesn't play all the kinds of music I like though. I need something to fill the gap. I'd love a crumhorn, and will probably get one one day, but the crumhorn is in many ways similar to the recorder, albeit it has a reed and is shaped like an umbrella handle. A hurdy gurdy would be wonderful, but perhaps that's a little too odd - I'd have to explain the basic concept of what one is to everybody every time I mentioned it.

Enter Kathryn Tickell. I have loved her music for several years. An accomplished fiddler and player of the Northumbrian smallpipes, she produces wonderfully energetic tunes as well as slower airs and things which are quite definitely in the realm of folk music which I love.

Northumbrian smallpipes? Yes! A kind of bagpipe, both a marvellously silly and remarkably ingenious instrumental concept. Take a bag made of leather, seal it as best you can, and attach a pipe to it with a one-way valve to fill it with air. Add a chanter with a double reed and some finger holes, and you've got yourself an instrument which you can play on continuously. It sounds like a blown instrument, but you never have to stop playing for breath, as the bag provides a reservoir that allows you to stop to inhale.

But why stop there? You can reduce the need for other people to share in your glory if you attach some drones to the bag to provide an accompaniment to your playing. If you really want, you can add some extra chanters too (on the uillean pipes, these are called regulators and are played with the side of the hand to add a bit of extra chordal accompaniment to the tune).

And why blow? Hook the intake pipe up to a set of bellows and you don't have to worry about damp on the reeds either, and you can keep your mouth free for singing, talking, witty banter or chastising the musicians you're supposed to be playing with.

At this point, I've reached a quandry: uillean pipes, or Northumbrian smallpipes? There are differences between them. Northumbrian pipes don't have regulators and have a closed-ended chanter. Uillean pipes need to be played sitting down so you can close the end of the chanter against the knee for some notes or to have it silent.

Northumbrian pipes are also supposed to be quiet - about as loud as a violin, which compares very favourably with the loud (and unpleasant) Great Highland Bagpipe much loathed by tourists everywhere there are men in kilts but much beloved by militaries around the world.

Since Kathryn Tickell plays the Northumbrian pipes, I was sold quite easily, and did some investigation. Eventually I joined the Northumbrian Pipers' Society and was able to hire a fairly simple set of pipes from them. These pipes, as expected, are in the traditional 'key' of F+ - so a G fingered on the chanter will come out a bit sharp of concert F, but not quite as sharp as concert F#. Wonderful.

This aside, they're a fine set of pipes, and I set about learning to play them with the aid of John Liestman's wonderful tutor book The Northumbrian Smallpipes Tutor and any advice I could wrangle from any pipers willing to help.

The first few days sort of blur together as a mess of hideous screeching and unpleasant experiences trying to keep a constant drone going, getting the hang of tuning the drones and the chanter and other such new-instrument difficulties. At home for Christmas, I was able to enlist Dad's help to construct a device much recommended by John Liestman in his book - a water manometer. This acts as a pressure gauge to help you learn how hard to squeeze the bag to make the pipes play nicely. Turns out I was being too gentle, and although we only made the contraption this morning I've already been able to gain a noteable improvement, even managing to produce a couple of tunes which my family recognised.

I can't wait until I go home and can practise without anybody listening again, but in the mean time the family are being quite supportive, which is always good. But then if they can put up with my sister self-teaching the clarinet, which is much louder, then hopefully they can handle me and my pipes (and my recorders) for a couple of weeks.

So as I write this first post (don't expect any of the others to be anywhere near as long) I've managed the following:

• A vaguely steady single drone from the low G drone, mostly in tune with the chanter
• Scale of G major on the chanter, one octave and moderately smoothly
• Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (it's the first tune in Liestmann's book)
  

Of course, many problems still remain. Particular problems of concern at the current time:

• How to press keys without the fingers slipping from the finger holes and causing squeaks
• How to remember which of the keys correspond to which note
• How to get used to the idea that for the fingered notes you lift a finger to produce a note, but for the keyed notes you have to press instead

Still, at least the society didn't send me a G set - the finger hole spacing is supposed to be smaller on those, and I'm already pushing it on the F+ chanter.

Tomorrow, more squeaking noises I expect.