Hi. I took up the pipes about a couple of months ago, and since I have no teacher but instead rely on a Na Piobairi DVD and Heather Clarke’s New Approach to Uilleann Piping, I am immensely curious as to what I should do to practice. I have a few things I’ve considered, like:
a) Doing the Lessons in the Heather Clarke book up to where I can’t manage it and have to polish the previous ones up to par before I start on the next.
b) Holding a note and concentrating on achieving a state of non-shakiness.
c) Practising tunes.
d) Scales.
So I was wondering if other players could use their experience to help me out with which one I should do every day, or if I should do all of them, and if so, which one is the most important, or maybe they all are, or maybe there’s yet more things that are necessary but I haven’t mentioned. It just would be really helpful to learn what other people do to improve their skills so that I’m not doing the wrong thing or missing out on doing something.
I’d say definitely stay with (b - long notes) and (d - scales) in the beginning, and practice those every time you sit down to play.
As for lessons and tunes, it’s probably best to be patient and only introduce those very slowly, when boredom threatens to overtake you Anything that keeps you motivated to practice is generally a good thing, but the fundamentals (like being able to maintain a steady note with relaxed hands) can take a long time on this instrument. Relaxed hands and a light grip are really important, as is posture. Also, be sure you’re not taking any shortcuts with the fingering, such as trying to use whistle or flute style fingerings.
About the NPU and Clarke tutors - I think these are excellent, but they are definitely not “one lesson per week” sorts of tutors. It could take years to master everything in the Clarke tutor and NPU volume 1, especially for someone who starts as an adult or who doesn’t have loads of time to practice.
I strongly advice doing the heather clarke book exercises.
When the first tunes start to pop up and then also use the DVD.
b) Holding a note and concentrating on achieving a state of non-shakiness.
If you have any trouble holding a note steady do this:
Pump the bag full of air, play the A note untill your bagarm gives up, no air pumping, no strain.
Then pump the bag full of air again and repeat.
After doing this a couple of times try to pump ONE FULL bellows of air into the bag while holding the note.
This is meant for your body to find the spot where your arm no longer has the power to press on the bag.
Just before that, pump air into the bag.
Rinse, repeat untill you no longer have to think about it.
Do NOT try to press out more air than you can putting strain on your arm/shoulder.
You are using muscles you normally don’t use, train them don’t abuse them.
Sound advice, and something new (and some old) pipers forget to think about. At this early stage in the game, if you are not careful you could remove ‘piping’ from your list of activities for life through a shoulder or CT injury.
I cannot agree with what Itisi wrote about bellows technique:
“Pump the bag full of air, play the A note untill your bagarm gives up, no air pumping, no strain. Then pump the bag full of air again and repeat.
After doing this a couple of times try to pump ONE FULL bellows of air into the bag while holding the note. This is meant for your body to find the spot where your arm no longer has the power to press on the bag.”
It is not about “where your arm no longer has the power…” The goal is to let the bag deflate to the point where a FULL STROKE of the bellows will not quite fill the bag. Learning how to do this takes practice but eventually it becomes second nature.
You want to play with the bag as full as possible because it is more efficient [consider how much more arm pressure is needed if the bag is half empty, compared to when it is nearly full]. At the same time, the bag cannot be too full, because if it is, you cannot control bag pressure with your (non-bellows) arm. From my point of view, the bellows arm provides power, the bag arm adjusts pressure. The bellows arm begins its stroke when there is enough room in the bag for a full stroke of bellows air and a little more.
I think I know what you are getting at here Nick, but I also feel that your wording is a bit misleading. It seems to me to suggest that one uses the bellows to power the chanter… and that is, of course, a no no.
As I see it, the bellows merely supplies the bag with air and the bag arm supplies power/pressure to the pipes. When refilling the bag, the idea (for me anyway) is to “blow the arm off the bag”, meaning that you maintain bag pressure (not intensely however) when refilling it with the bellows. Attention should be on not using the bellows to fill the chanter.
Another female piper! Welcome! I agree with the advice about not overstraining your arm and shoulder muscles. When I started, I used to play for about a minute and then take a two or three minute break to rest my muscles when they ached. You will build up stamina over time.
Probably the best piece of advice I got from a piping teacher has been to practice playing tunes (or even scales) slowly and precisely. Don’t worry about not being able to play up to speed. That will come eventually. Focus on being able to play the notes and ornaments, precisely and in tune, at a very slow pace, with good rhythm. That feels like a lot to manage at first, when you’re still learning how to handle bellows and bag, but don’t give up.
And try to find an instructor or a tionol (piping workshop) near you soon. Splendid isolation is highly overrated. There’s nothing more inspiring than having a face-to-face lesson and being around other pipers!
Never heard of going about it that way. Sounds like a way to deal with hard reeds. I advise people to play a few bars sans bellows, to get used to using their bag arm to power the pipes, since if you’re relying on the bellows for power you’ll be screwed trying to play left hand ornaments, or regulators. But probably I wind up doing something similiar to what you’re saying anyway, except when I’m really jumping around on the regulators - sometimes I’ll go really flat on the bag that way.
Someone wrote here about overpowering the reed at times for a little extra tone, on notes where the reed can handle it of course, like A. That’s an Intermediate sort of technique, I can’t recall running across it in tutors - maybe it’s in one of the newer ones?
I freely admit that either 1) I could be wrong, or 2) my comments about bellows/bag and power/adjustment are misunderstood. But this is how I explain these things to myself. Hard reed, soft reed, not relevant to this. I’m trying to figure out how to use bellows & bag efficiently, and explain how it happens.
The bellows arm provides the power, the bag arm adjusts it. The bag arm is always providing pressure for adjustment. Joseph is absolutely correct that one never drives the reeds directly with the bellows.
Assume, for the moment, you are playing a single note on the chanter & need a steady supply of air, no pressure variation. Once you get good at using bellows & bag, you can time the bellows stroke so that the bag is Very Nearly Full at the end of the bellows stroke. At that moment arm pressure on the bag is relatively small. As the bag empties, arm pressure on the bag needs to gradually increase to keep the note steady. I believe that the time for another bellows stroke -a full stroke- comes when the bag is empty enough to accept it and be back to its Very Nearly Full state. A good player does this with little, if any, conscious thought.
Note that the amount of pressure used by the bellows arm during the bellows stroke will always be more than the amount of pressure used by the bag arm. That’s one reason I say that the power comes from the bellows.
I didn’t and don’t find scales all that useful, but picking out phrases and tricky bits and repeating like you might do with scales is crucial. Developing the muscle strength, coordination, and memory depends on going through the various patterns (of notes and gracing) over and over.
Playing slowly and accurately is an end goal. It may or may not be a starting point. Find a speed that part of a phrase makes sense and keep at it until you can slow it down… to a crawl. When you get to a tionol or the WCSS and the teacher asks you to play back a phrase, you don’t want the embarassment of not being able to play notes slowly.
Although I didn’t do this when I started, I now advocate learning tunes on the whistle and getting to the point where you can lilt them more or less accurately. The Clarke tutor is full of “piping” but kind of obscures the idea there’s a tune under all the embellishment. You can attack both simultaneously.
For the shakes, it might help to find some time when noone else is around and play single notes for ridiculously long periods of time. You might use the note as a drone while you sing something you like, the longer the better.
Recall that carissa started out saying she’d started “a couple of months ago”. When I say scales, I don’t mean “exercises” so much as simple D and G major scales. I think that most learners attempt to play tunes way too early, and fail to get the basic mechanics right from the start. Scales allow the learner to get used to bag and bellows technique (long, steady notes; proper fingering; chanter closures; starting and stopping notes with the fingers and not the bag/bellows) without being distracted by remembering tunes, remembing unfamiliar fingering patterns, etc.
That’s why, in response to Carissa’s question, I advocated long notes and scales over “practicing tunes” and even the Heather Clarke book. I don’t have my copy of Clarke anymore, but as I recall the first three or four lessons would be ample material for the initial couple of months - if really done to perfection.
As for learning tunes on whistle, I think that can be useful in the later stages, but there is a danger of whistle technique and fingering getting in the way, during the initial stages of getting to know the chanter. A common downfall of learners is inadvertantly falling back on whistle fingerings or techniques when learning a tune on the pipes.
Using bellows and bag should require no thinking.
So to teach a beginner’s body where that point lies to pump the bellows (so they don’t have to think about it anymore) the exercise i wrote above works very well.
The point where the bag will accept a full bellows of air is more or less at the same time a BEGINNER’s arm will give up because it hasn’t got the power to keep pressing the bag.
Put in another bellows of air and hey, look.., wow, the bag is full again.
You might feel when it’s time to pump the bellows, a beginner does not.
Im going to stay out of the specifics mentioned above and suggest a more general approach:
15-20 minutes daily concentrated practice is far more beneficial than an hour or so of unfocused flailing twice weekly.
Pick out ONE problem /technique/issue/tune you particularly wish to deal with in your practice session before you strap up the pipes, and work on that one thing only with your time, be it steady pumping, bag pressure, finger position, reed strength, or “the Merry Sisters” reel…
Also, (if you can do it,) it will really help to think about the “practice topic” aurally and internally before picking up the instrument, (Like, ya sing da chune in yer heid foist, yaknowwaddimean?), THEN externalize it on the instrument.
Over a period of time, everything else will fall into place, if learned correctly at this stage. NOTHING about Uillean pipes can be rushed.
For those at tune playing stage, I read an interesting thing about practicing (albeit for the piano). It was a conservatorium website I think (just can’t remember the URL) but it had to do with avoiding muscle strain.
It said you shouldn’t practice music (tunes in our case) slowly as we all think we should. We should be practicing short segments at correct tempo. Something to do with subconsciously increasing stress in our finger muscles by consciously playing slower than we know the tune should be.
I have to say I disagree rather violently with this notion, at least where the pipes are involved.
Most people play tunes too fast anyway.
As for the subconscious, playing fast is a sure way to increase muscle tension. Learning to control the tempo (i.e. being able to slow a tune down consciously, without muscle strain) is a cornerstone of chanter technique and dexterity. True, playing a tune at something other than one’s habitual speed can cause stress at first, but this is a sign that you’re not playing it slowly enough yet…
I can’t think of a single noteworthy pipe instructor who would suggest the above form of tune practicing… it would be about as cunducive to injury (mental and physical), as an open flame near white gas is conducive to an explosion.
Personally, I cannot think of a better invitation to repetitive motion injury.
I violently agree with Bill. I’m a classically trained musician and the concept of practicing slowly and accurately (for a very long time of necessary) is the foundation of learning an instrument. I’ve haven’t met a teacher, performer, or read a text that deviates from this.
Also the concept of attaining complete control over tempo, playing precisely at any speed is very important. It’s very easy to get stuck in a mode of playing fast (and probably slightly unevenly). Complete control is the objective.
Perhaps the technique mentioned of playing short segments at speed is a particular tool for advanced piano students, but I think it’s bad advice for most situations.
When I read this, I have this mental image of billh trashing his workshop!!
I think the nuance is “correct tempo” and as billh rightly pointed out, most people (me included) play too fast, although since I’ve started listening to Mick O’Brien, I’ve begun to appreciate the virtues of taking one’s time.
In fact, I nearly got a traffic ticket last Friday because I was listening to the CD Kitty Lie Over while driving home from work. MOB and COR take their time with the tunes and manage to put so much more into them. I was listening to The Sporting Pitchfork & The Rambling Pitchfork and didn’t realise that I’d let my foot ease off the accelerator. I was doing 70 kmh on the highway - the limit is 100 kmh but everyone does 110 - when I noticed a police car was behind me. He then pulled up along side and gave me a good long stare. I probably did look a little spaced out, playing the “air chanter” on the steering wheel and the “air regulators” on the gear shift and with my left foot tapping the break pedal in time to the music (probably just enough to cause the break lights to light up).
Anything that keeps you motivated to practice is generally a good thing, but the fundamentals (like being able to maintain a steady note with relaxed hands) can take a long time on this instrument. Relaxed hands and a light grip are really important, as is posture. Also, be sure you’re not taking any shortcuts with the fingering, such as trying to use whistle or flute style fingerings.