Tips for teaching Uilleann pipes

[rorybbellows]

So some young kid comes to you and asks if you would teach her/him to play the Uilleann pipes They have got hold of a decent practice set , where do you go from here ?

RORY

[PJ]

1. Show them how to hold the instrument - posture, holding the chanter, positioning the bellows.
2. Get them used to pumping the bellows to maintain steady bag-pressure
3. Cover all tone holes and make sure no air is leaking out.
4. Start with some basic scales in the first octave, holding each note for a few moments, closing the chanter between each note, and playing each note steadily.

Mastering the above will cover the first lesson. Send them away to practice that for a week. When the come back, (provided they can play a steady scale), you can get them started on a basic tune, Song of the Chanter, Dawning of the Day, etc.

[oliver]

Give them the Rowsome tutor for instance and get away with it !

[CaperMike]

PJ's tips are good.

Make sure the youngster is large enough, if it a regular sized set usually 11 or 12.

I like the Heather Clarke tutor for teaching.

Get the physical aspects right first : covering all holes , bellows work and bag pressure. Make sure they learn to avoid the death grip.

Start with a simple few notes of a scale and make sure all is comfortable before proceeding to the musicality bit.

Have fun, make sure you find tunes they like!

Mike

[john]

have a look at ronan browne's youtube site - his son is doing very well and is even managing comfortably on a flat set

[kathaleenypoopa]

Definitely make sure they have access to some classic recordings of Ennis, Clancy, Rowsome, Reck. Listen listen listen.

K

[pancelticpiper]

My thought is that before you go to playing tunes, you need to be able to get around on the chanter competently, and before you start getting around on the chanter, you need to be able to blow a steady note.

We've all heard people blasting through tunes with sloppy fingering and uneven blowing... it's what comes from not mastering one component before going onto the next.

So I start them out just playing B, holding that note, until they can blow it steady. Why B? Because they only need to get two holes sealed to produce it. A or G are fine too, but I've found trying to start with Bottom D is frustrating, because there are 8 digits that have to be perfectly sealed to produce that note, which is a huge task for a beginner. Also Bottom D is unstable and will go between Hard and Soft and burble and break, while B, A, and G are relatively trouble-free. In other words, give the person one task at a time, and make it a task they can achieve fairly easily. The first task is to learn to blow a steady tone; everything else in piping stems from that base.

After the easy notes of B, A, and G they can learn to work their way down the scale, mastering the sealing of the holes one digit at a time. Eventually they will play all the notes from Bottom D up to high B but only long tones, the emphasis being on pure clean tone and clean transitions between the notes.

This part will be controversial, I suppose, though I'm merely following Leo Rowsome's method: I want them to be able to negotiate the chanter before learning tunes. So, I have them do exercises that give them the ability to get from any note to any note, so that when they go to learn tunes they won't encounter anything they can't already do well.

I fully realise that this flies in the face of how many people learn traditional music. They just listen and keep hammering away and "talent will out", that is, if they have the talent everything will eventually fall into place, and if they don't, it won't.

There's a fascinating story about this in the wonderful book May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Folk Music by Dr Timothy Rice.

Here it is, Dr Rice's first lesson on Gaida, the Bulgarian pipes:

"When I arrived at Dimitur Grivnin's house for my first lesson, he was already playing, and his ten-year-old grandson was attempting to follow along as best he could. The lesson consisted of Grivnin playing at full speed without simplification while his grandson played along, following.

The grandson, however, could neither play the melody nor mimic in any precise way what his grandfather was doing. His playing resembled noodling, that is, it consisted of disorganized fragments of sound played with rapid finger movement in no discernable pattern. I infer that what he saw, heard, and understood was that his grandfather's music burbled with dense sounds and required rapid finger movements; he probably didn't understand the metrical, melodic, and ornamental structures of the music; and certainly if he did understand these things he wasn't able to coordinate his fingers to produce them.

Grivnin invited me to join in the playing and soon the three of us were making a terrible racket. My tack at this point was to hold a drone and listen for the melody and rhythm, notice the fingerings he used to produce the melody, ignore the ornamentation and rapid finger movements and find the tune on my instrument. After a few trials I managed to play a hesitant clumsy version of the melody devoid of any ornamentation or much rhythm.

Suddenly Grivnin stopped, pointed at me, and shouted enthusiastically at his grandson "That is what you should be playing. See what a good musician he is."

Although Grivnin was frustrated that his grandson couldn't produce a tune, it was clear to me that the child had learned and understood something, and was probably closer to becoming a gaidar than I was. Although I had the cognitive categories necessary to abstract a tune out of Grivnin's maze of amazing sound, it would be years before I had the cognitive equipment to play the ornamentation as well as his grandson came to play it. The boy, for example, occasionally produced sounds in patterns very close to or exactly like his grandfather's ornaments, whereas I had no idea how these ornaments worked and couldn't imagine my fingers moving fast enough to produce them. The boy understood, or was trying to understand, the total sound of the instrument, not just the melody. What he saw were rapidly moving fingers, what he heard was a dense succession of sounds, and he tried to reproduce both. His mind and fingers had grasped, or were close to grasping, the essence of the ornamentation.

I watched him walk through the streets of the village, fingers flying, bagpipe burbling, happily searching for the music."

This story is more or less a guy with a Doctorate in Music admitting that he was being bested by a 10 year old... for sure a couple years later the boy would be a great player, the good Doctor a mediocre one.

[Tunborough]

Interesting to see the name of Timothy Rice come up. I crossed his path many, many years ago. I probably wouldn't be on this forum if he hadn't, in his role as academic advisor, reassured a young engineering student that he could probably manage Music 100 despite having no musical training. In the end, although my talent for music wasn't really up to the course, my talents for writing and remembering were enough to get a decent grade.

A couple of weeks ago, my daughter used my old textbook from that course as a reference for an essay. She learned her instrument following the precepts of Sinichi Suzuki, which are somewhere between Richard's and those of Dr. Rice's Bulgarian grandfather. She and I learned together, starting with bow exercises, then a few notes and simple tunes, moving on only when the basics were mastered. I had a head start on her, because I knew more about music, but she left me in the dust after about two years.

Really, Rory, the most important element in your lessons is a motivated student, and it sounds like you already have that. Good luck.

[Calum]

My general approach to teaching is to start with the assumption that everybody can learn quickly and play well, and if they're not, it's my fault as a teacher, and I have to work out what I'm doing wrong.

One important thing is to teach all the aspects of being a musician - not just how to finger and play tunes, but how to maintain an instrument, music theory, aural skills, transcribing/writing, composing, performing, all this stuff.

[pancelticpiper]

One important thing is to teach all the aspects of being a musician - not just how to finger and play tunes, but how to maintain an instrument, music theory, aural skills, transcribing/writing, composing, performing, all this stuff.

Yes eventually. About transcribing/writing I leave that decision to the learner, because some want to learn by ear and have no interest in written music. I respect that wish.

Others come with a prior background and are musically literate. With those people I start out with written exercises however I don't want them to be dependent on sheet music and once they're ready for tunes I have them learn the tunes by ear.

Once they get relatively fluent on their instrument I have them do a thing where I put on a CD of tunes neither of us know and demonstrate how one "finds the tune" and soon enough we're both hammering away along with the album. I feel that it's imperative for an ITM player to be able to pick up tunes by ear.

One thing I stress, probably because it's the way I was taught, was to simultaneously teach a tune and teach how to play variations. Just like my first teacher did, I first teach them (by ear of course) a basic version of a tune, then begin exploring numerous alternative ways of playing it. This helps them get a large number of traditional patterns under their fingers, which in turn makes picking up new tunes easier.

[bcullen]

Triads and Diads from D to A second octave up and down . Legato and Staccato Nice warm up.
I am also using a couple of exercises from "The masters touch" Seamus Ennis. Things called nipping and clipping Heather
Clarke is great for getting the feel of a tune. YOU TUBE

So all in all learning? To me it is about resources and IF and how you can use them. Nothing beats a one on one tho
Bryan