I was going to post this on the 'What’s so good about self-taught…" thread but I thought I’d make a new topic.
Having largely taught myself over the past ten years, here’s a few things I’d like to say -
Self taught or teacher taught can produce the same results - it’s got lots to do with the individual. I learned the trumpet for 7 years with a teacher and made some progress but my heart really wasn’t in it. I switched to Irish music, took up the whistle and experimented with technique prior to finding out how to do it properly.
Then I progressed to pipes. Here’s some tips which have really helped me -
Listen to one particular piper at first. I chose Liam O’Flynn simply because I started out on Planxty records.
Listen and listen until you can lilt a tune, or most of a tune, from memory
I started with ‘Si Beag Si Mor’ , ‘Planxty Irwin’ and ‘Hewlett’
Try to copy EXACTLY what the piper does, hence I recommend to stick away from the cowboys who do lots of acrobatics. But don’t worry if you can’t do the entire tune, just try to copy bits. Just like the apprentice painters of old, they learned by copying as exactly as they could the paintings of their masters.
—don’t worry if you can’t do everything they can, a forum like this is a good place to find ideas on what a particular piper does in a particular tune of a particular recording.-----
Use the Clarke tutor as it gives the fundamental and important embelishments such as staccatto triplets etc as well as touches on variations. In fact, get through this before doing the copying-a-master thing.
Don’t worry too much about variation to a great degree. Whilst it is an imortant part of ITM, it can be accomplished through the most minimal of changes. - A blues player once told me about learning to improvise, he said to begin by simply changing one note only, and there’s your variation.
Once in a while get an experienced piper to show you some tricks - I know, easier said than done.
keep copying a master
7b) Write them a letter (if they’re still alive, or else burn incense on their grave), but don’t expect a reply - in both instances
8/ start to expand your variations and soon you will develop a style of your own without necessarily becoming ‘unorthodox’.
watch your rhythm and timing - if you copy a master, then record your own playing you can compare yourself with the master and find out where you need to improve. That will also improve your own sense of listening.
—a good freebie program for recording yourself on the PC is Goldwave, available from www.goldwave.com----
This is basically how I’ve gone about it but I must admit I have had a couple of informal lessons from my pipe maker here in Brisbane and now he sometimes sends students to me for tuition or passes wedding jobs on to me if he can’t do them, so I guess I must be doing something right.
with you on everything but “getting through the clarke tutor before you imitate a master”.
getting through the clarke tutor, playing most of the tunes properly, would take years.
hopefully, you do at least some imitating from recordings earlier than that.
meir
I respectfully disagree. Assuming that a beginning player isn’t struggling with a faulty instrument, there is no reason that you couldn’t get through most of it in 6-9 months. All of the techniques that Clarke gives can easily be practiced outside of a tune, in mass quantities. Developing fine motor coordination and muscle memory is the name of the game whilst you develop an “ear”, IMO. If a person can’t do all the gracing, rolls, triplets, and crans, as Heather does, in isolation and with control, it is time to buckle down with basic drills for finger control and forget about slopping through tunes, at least in prime practice time. All the rest of the time, you can learn some tunes on the whistle.
I switched to Irish music, took up the whistle and experimented with technique prior to finding out how to do it properly.
I think this is an excellent idea, I did this myself. Starting with the whistle is one of the best ways to develop rhythm and timing with ITM. If you start here and then take up the pipes, you going to make much better progress because you’re already pretty familiar with how the music is supposed to go and you can concentrate more on wrestling the octopus. You can also catch any mistakes you may make when you’re teaching yourself ornaments, like rolls, because you’ve already gotten them down on the whistle (presumably).
Starting with the whistle is ideal because it is a relatively simple instrument to master, allowing you to concentrate on the music you’re trying to play. Getting proficient on the whistle (maybe playing a year or so) is an excellent first step to learning the pipes.
I did just what David did and tried to mimic Liam to learn the pipes. He is an excellent piper who puts just the right amount of ornaments into his playing without bordering on acrobatics. Some people like to get right into technicalities right from the start, but I think that learning by ear in the beginning is really worthwhile and that learning technicalities is best saved for when you are a bit more competent (although the downside is that you may have to unlearn what you thought you were doing right).
It took me a few months to get an O’Flynn CD so I firstly played along with only two recordings of pipes that I had, which were Liam O’Flynn playing on an Enya’s ‘The Celts’ album (Track: ‘The sun in the stream’) and Davy Spillane’s tune on the Riverdance video (Dunno what the tune’s called and I wouldn’t be able to spell it anyway). Looking back, these two tracks are good for beginners as Liam’s tune centres around the first octave (with the exception of E) and has a few cuts between A and Hard D (and we all know how much we use this one!), while Davy’s tune takes you right up to Cnat in the second octave and is suitably slow for beginners.
I put this in as I was writing because I realised when looking back on how I taught myself that I couldn’t really copy a master unless I had an idea of what sort of techniques he was probably using. So because I had gone through the Clarke tutor first (or most of it) I had a good idea that the piper was using a crann or a staccato triplet or whatever in such and such a place.
I think that, as Eric said, one could get through the Clarke tutor satisfactorily, assuming committed practice once a day for at least half an hour, in around a year or so.
Yes, in fact as I already had been listening to pipe music a few years before obtaining a set of pipes, I used to try and mimic pipe techniques, such as cranns etc on the whistle. Purchasing Leo Rowsome’s tutor for pipes also gave me some insight into pipe technique which I tried to emmulate to varying degrees of success on the whistle. I even used to go through the motions of playing the whistle like a chanter, not blowing it, but using the fingering and raising and lowering it off my knee, just to see what it might be like to play a chanter.
Hell…I even constructed a bagpipe, mouthblown, out of a wine cask bladder (an Australian thing) with a D whistle connected, a blow pipe, and the D note from one of those tuning pipes. It worked very well. The tuning pipe didn’t need a lot of pressure so I was able to keep the whislte in the bottom octave. I took it to school and reduced the music class to tears of laughter. I thing it was the fumes fromthe wine-bladder.
Man you really wanted to play the pipes. Pretty ingenious, I would have loved to have heard it. Maybe next time you could try a paper towel tube tied to a latex glove blown by a bicycle tire foot pump. You could be the Rube Goldberg of uilleann pipes!
I have a friend here in Brisbane, Lindsay Pollack, who does much the same thing with latex gloves, gaida chanters and suitcases pumped with a foot pump. He even makes clarinets out of holowed out carrots fitted with clarinet mouth pieces. He’s very popular all around the country doing festivals and kids shows.
Yes, I think drills are very useful. I think someone should produce a book of drills for piping. If I remember rightly, Leo Rowsome’s tutor book had some drills for things like ‘tipping’ and stuff.
I like to practice back D cuts in isolation up and down the chanter and other things.
I also have a stubborn ‘A’ finger which likes to tense up when I’m trying to do an A roll. Drilling has helped a lot to loosen it up.
Drilling helps, to a degree, with loosening up the fingers. It’s best use, for me, is developing muscle memory. For relaxing the hands, one has to make a conscious effort of mind to let go of the death grip…taking a deep and relaxing breath can do wonders for this. The idea being to become as comfortable with the instrument as you can be, after all, it is an unusual position for the body and hands to get used to.
Also, funny as it may sound, try to ‘not try so hard’. The harder you try, you may find the harder it becomes. Don’t be afraid of ‘bad noises’, they come with the territory, just play through them and eventually they ought to become fewer and fewer.
Time spent on this (or any) instrument will determine your growth.
This reminds me of something I noticed Jerry O’Sullivan doing over the years. Whenever he plays a single note, like when he’s tuning or just firing up the pipes, he’ll use a “tight” crotchet roll (as I’ve described ad nauseum elsewhere) instead of just a naked note. Emulating this habit is what gave me the ability to play these on the top hand, as it gives me lots of “extra” practice.
Ronan Browne talked about relaxing the fingers as a requirement to speed (and clean execution) at Bruce Foley’s Pittsburgh tionol years ago. While he played, I noticed his bottom thumb was lower on the chanter than my own. From that point on, I tried to consciously think about what my thumb was doing, sometimes even taking it off the chanter altogether or consciously moving it down. This is what ended the death grip for me.
