I’m looking for feedback on practice techniques. Coming from a classically trained background, I’m used to spending time on breathing / embouchre exercises for tone production, scales, technical studies.
I’ve translated this into the follwing activities on my UPs:
Long notes and slow scales concetrating on even pressure and tuning.
Scales and patterns around fingerings I find tricky in tunes.
Various triplets, crans, turns etc.
What do you folks do or recommend, other than playing tunes, obviously. All comments and answers gratefully received.
P.S. I am not blowing any unusual gasses through the bellows and I can generate about 450W on a bicycle.
I am back to practicing with a metronome and purposefully slowing down the tempo just below what I’d like. This helps with articulation
… I played with a bodhran player the other day who found when I switched to playing UPs (was playing smallpipes – I’m much more proficient on those), my rhythm was too irragular to play along with.
As I’m new to UPs, I lose regular rhythm, especially when I tire and the instrument becomes a battle.
I find it extremely helpful to record myself playing once in a while. Easier to become objective and find flaws (lot’s of them though) in your playing. This is especially true regarding to rythm and realizing that ever so often I’m playing everything too fast, even though I like to play things slow…
Rob
Another thing I do is work up and down the scale doing rolls, then cuts to each note, then play the scale legato, then stacatto, then bend/slur each note to the next, etc.
