We hear people talking about setting REALISTIC goals. When you’re practicing, do you have a specific goal in mind or are you just running over the tunes? Unless you have a specific realistic goal you’re wasting your time and may be doing more damage than good! Whoa! This is not permission to skip practice. It’s […]
Author Archive for: Ron
Entries by Ron Bowen
Music – The arrangement of sounds that convey imagination and emotion. Math – The numeric logic of everything in the universe. We had a very good conversation last night at practice about note values, where a particular note falls within a beat or measure, the relationship between notes of different value, and how these notes […]
My “Do wah diddy diddy” post got nothing, but the follow-up “flippy thing” got action? I would have thought it the other way around. Go figure! Today I want to talk about something that REALLY bugs me. The D-Strike. So often I see/hear pipers massacring this simple embellishment by overlapping two distinct movements. The mechanics […]
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Let’s take example #1 in the image above. We’re going from E to F with a G grace note on the F. It doesn’t seem complicated however you may be surprised at how many pipers don’t execute this properly. What I find sometimes is that a piper will […]
Many Average Pipers struggle to learn new music. They can pick up a new song on the radio in minutes. They can also sing along with the oldies from 50 years ago without forgetting a single word! If I sang out “There she was just a-walkin’ down the street, singing…” there’s not a one of […]
Many apologies for the interruption in The Average Piper posts. I could provide hollow excuses, but I won’t. I will take advantage of the pause in tactical information to regroup on a more philosophical level. Ready? Here goes! I have often said that bagpipes are not taught… They are learned! It’s true. Having been teaching […]
The “flip” to even GDE’s (as in the previous blog post) is the dot/cut rhythm you’ll find in some tunes. This is shown in the image above where the G is a dotted eighth note, or three sixteenths. The D is a sixteenth note and the E is an eighth note. Drilling down further on […]
The Average Piper – Vitamins GD&E Simply stated, there’s nothing else like it. Nothing even comes close. A regimen of properly executed GDE exercises is like steel-cut oatmeal with nuts and berries for breakfast. If you master GDE’s, played evenly and with a dot/cut rhythm, you have built a critical foundation that will serve you […]
I sometimes hear pipers attempting to “catch up” after having fallen behind the established tempo of the tune. Hint…YOU CAN”T CATCH UP (without making a mess of things)! What is the appropriate tempo? A march played at 70 beats-per-minute may sound slow and lifeless. The same march played at 90 beats-per-minute may sound frantic and […]
I received words and pictures of Donald MacKenzie’s bagpipe last night. Donald was John Ban MacKenzie’s son and served in the first Crimean War. He died in 1863 at the age of 30 from smallpox and is commemorated in John Ban’s composition “His Father’s Lament for Donald MacKenzie”. Pictures and words can be found at […]
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