does anybody know of any good uilleann tutor gear. is the davy spillane one pretty good? and advice would be great, thanks.
Heather Clarke’s New Approach to Uilleann Piping is the best for beginners, in my view. Once you have the basics under your belt, have a look at the following site:
http://www.uilleannpipestutor.com/
It’s a great resource for picking up popular piping tunes.
thank you once again PJ for your helpful information.
I second the recommendation for the Heather Clarke book.
Reviews of the Spillane tutor have been less positive.
However, the Clarke book is not an “exercise a day” tutor - be prepared to spend weeks on each lesson, or at least find yourself backtracking to “really” learn the early lessons all over. As an adult learner years ago, it was months (no, years 
) before I exhausted the material in Clarke.
A similar thing could be said of the NPU video/DVD tutorials - there’s many, many of hours of practice between viewing and being able to play the exercises competently. I reckon that makes these tutorials a bargain!
I started out with the Pat Sky tutor, which while perhaps weaker in the lessons department than Clarke, includes valuable background material about pipes and piping - such as information on pipe and reed maintenance, reedmaking, poetry, bad jokes, etc. I wonder if it’s back in print?
Bill
thanks Bill, it looks like i will be getting that Heather Clarke tutor. 
I think Pat Sky’s book is revised and back in print. The website PJ mentioned is also very good. It’s Mick Coyne’s site and he put a lot of effort into it. The tunes are played at a reasonable pace with and are usually also notated in 3 formats. He also has exercise pages for rolls, triplets, crans, and even backstitching with audio and text. Be aware though, Mick is a very tight player and his tutor stuff is based around this style which is a little tougher than the modern open style. Lest I open a can of worms, I think most authorities agree that it’s a good idea to learn tight first before you open things up. Of course as a former flute player I still have to focus on resisting the urge to play more open!
Here are links to NPU and the video tutors The Art of Uilleann Piping.
As someone who came to uilleann piping from Scottish piping, I would second the suggestion to concentrate on tight/closed playing from early on. It’s what makes uilleann pipes unique and even amongst relatively “open” players, putting the occasional space between notes gives the tunes a greater degree of maturity. People who have experience with other bagpipes (except NSP, of course) or flutes generally find it easy to just start knocking tunes out of UPs with completely open fingering. This may be nice at the beginning, but it makes things harder later on when you’re set in your ways and your playing sounds really sloppy. It makes sense to really get the tight stuff figured out sooner rather than later and then over the years as you begin to get comfortable with your own playing, you can alter your “style” as you see fit. Mick O’Brien is a good example of this: if you listen to his playing from when he was young (like in the recent “Siar An Bóthar” episode mentioned in another thread or his playing on the “Piper’s Rock” album), it was pretty tight stuff; he pretty much stuck in tight bits wherever he could…More recent recordings seem to suggest that he adds tight triplets and other pippety-poppity bits to his playing a little more sparingly now (he is also, in my opinion, the man for off-the-knee playing).
Go with the Clarke book, be patient, and most importantly, remember that just because it’s called “tight piping” doesn’t mean you should grip the chanter tightly…
The Pat Sky tutor is in print and is available from none other than Pat Sky:
http://www.patricksky.com/Page-4.htm
$24 plus $4 s&h in the U.S.
No E
This topic would make a good sticky I’m a-thinkin’ 
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