OK …we’ve all got’em …so what sins will you publicly announce on the forum?
Me…erm 
… I don’t always get my bottom two fingers back onto the chanter [ after an e ] to keep the f# in tune.
Oh, and I spent several months declaring that my small [tenor?] reg reed was flat…but eventually discovered that it was in fact a middle [baritone?] reed…ho hum
Boyd 
Oh, yeah, I got 'em. My biggest one is “bellowsing” to get the jump notes (upper octave yips and pops). I grew up playing clarinet-pretty hardcore at that. When I got my first practice set, I was so hardwired to generating sound through breath, that I would blow out of my mouth with every bellows stroke. What first seemed like piping euphoria was quickly reveled to be asphyxiation. Years later, I still have trouble at times disengaging this sound-through-breath mechanism.
Oh, and there is still DGS (death-grip syndrome) at times.
t
Well I have been struggling along on my own now for about five weeks and probably picking up every bad habit known.
However it has been a lot of fun along the way!!
Got my drone set on order to magnify the fun loads more as well!!!
I still have the bellows thing going. I get so intent on getting the tune played, all the gracing and so forth, that I find myself running out of air… it’s like “ah, shite, I forgot to pump!!” Bad habit. But I’m working on it.
Trying to imitate guitar feedback …
Is that bad though?
Alan
Compulsively revisiting this forum when I should be practicing.
Compulsively revisiting this forum when I should be practicing.
HAHA! How about playing Jimi Hendrix tunes on the pipes… not kushdi 
but I do admit I do it once in a while 
PD.
Alan, are you saying that reed squawks and ele. guitar feedback has something in common? Hey, could you hook up a little “chorus” to the reed mic of yours? 
My bad habit confession is that I’m superstitious…the reed has to be pointing a certain direction in the reed seat. Oh, and I don’t handle the set like I always should before putting it on or after taking it off…I leave the chanter dangling (it’s never come off though).
I thought I was the only person who did that…
Oh…I suppose I could list bad habits, but the list of really good habits would be shorter!
My worst bad habit right now is probably related to sitting posture while playing. I start out right, but after a while I hunch over and struggle with the drones slipping down my leg and the chanter taking on some strange angle…but, as things get easier, these may be sort of self correcting.
Anybody else experience posture problems?
Bad habits? Why the hell d’ya want to know about my bad habits?!
Well, I used to smoke, I’m occasionally prone to eating cookies in bed, and one real bad one I can’t seem to kick is that I play uilleann pipes.
watch out…that last one can be hazardous to your immediate health. at least with smoking when you shave years off your life they’re the crappy years at the end anyway.
Live fast, die young, make a pretty corpse…
If you get some leakage just right off the knee you can get some weird overtones in both octaves that sound like a left-handed Stratocaster being humped into a Marshall stack. I don’t know how controllable or useful it is, but sometimes I just say, “What, you didn’t like that?” and pretend I’m playing Jazz.
Royce
Exactly Royce!! Afterall, harmonics are the fundamentals of feedback (whether you like it or not) and there are endless harmonic possibilities with all three parts of your pipes going at once.
Why the Left Hand Strat? My pipes sound like a LH Jaguar in a marshall stack
Innovation is tomorrows tradition…
Alan
Bad Habit? Thinking I know what I’m doing when I try to adjust my chanter reed to make it sound the way it did one day a few weeks ago when it’s obvious that I don’t. I need to kick that habit while I’ve only one reed to worry about. Can you get patches for that on prescription?
Cheers, Mac
Alan,
Do you play guitar left-handed ?
Tony,
I only whisk an egg and shoot a bow LH.
Alan
Sometimes, I don’t wash my hands after playing the pipes. I’m a dirty little boy. 