Mark Lamont says, “Watch a video of John D. Burgess. His hands are softly on his chanter. Amazing player who’s considered the first real piping prodigy.” 

I agree with the first part. Two comments, not so much on the third one. John D. Burgess was an absolutely fantastic player. I knew him in his later days. He was past his playing days. But I remember he judged me a few times in Scotland. Fantastic person and a real character. Just think of these glamorous movie stars of the past generations. He was like that. He was a true star of piping. And his personality, he backed it up with his track record. He won the gold medal in Scotland, which is the top prize at age 16. So he was a true prodigy. I don’t think he was the first one. There’s certainly one of the great talents of the piping world. And there’s a fantastic video of Burgess playing. If you just look up John D. Burgess, Seamus McNeil. And those are two great characters of piping. And I think there’s a BBC or some television program. And it’s John Burgess playing pipes. And there’s two things, multiple things about it. It’s a masterclass in how to play with ease. So I mean, it just barely looks like he’s blowing bubbles in milk with his blowpipe. Drones don’t move. Everything is just really still. And then the fingers hardly coming off the chanter. 

So that’s the gold standard right there to not only look like it’s easy, but to actually have it be easy. So when you watch that, it’s like, wow. He makes it look easy. Well, I would argue that it looks easy because it is easy for him. So how can you do something like play the bagpipe and have it be easy? Well, practice getting in shape, but also doing things properly. And that goes right back to your early stages or wherever you are in your piping career and practicing in a way which you play with a lot of ease. Keep the hands soft, keep them low, make sure your pipes are optimized so that they’re as efficient as possible. I think when you watch a great athlete, like Roger Federer, one of the great tennis players, he just had so much smoothness and finesse with his playing. Obviously he’s an insanely powerful athlete. And you say, “Well, it just looks easy for him.”  And I think certain things that he could do that were exceptionally difficult were easy for him because he’d optimized his technique and because he’d practiced it, right? 

There’s a lot going on when you’re playing the pipes. We have the fingering, we have the technique, we have the timing, we have our tempo, we’re marching around, we’re blowing our pipes. There’s multiple things going on and it’s impossible to focus on all of them. But in order to be good, all those things have to be good, even when you’re not thinking about them. So how can you play a good birl without thinking about it? How can you keep a steady bag pressure when you’re not thinking about it? How can you keep a steady tempo when you’re thinking about something else? Well, the way we do that is by practicing things properly and getting enough reps and enough practice that it’s good enough on its own. So it requires you to get automatic so that these things just happen on their own. So you can think, “Oh, what’s the next tune that’s going to be coming up here? Oh yeah.” And when you have that thought about the next tune, that your hands don’t just fall off the chanter or that you forget to blow. In the early stages, you have to think about the blowing. And I’ve seen this with students when they go from the practice chanter and they transition to the pipes, you have to think about blowing and squeezing and all the mechanics of it because you’re new to it. But then what happens when you’ve practiced it enough, it becomes automatic. And if you read about the theories of motor learning and blowing your pipes or playing a birl, these are all motor skills. There’s three stages. The first stage is where you have to think about every step and you’re using words and rules and it’s the verbal stage. And then the final stage is the autonomous stage where these things happen automatically. The middle stage is called the associative stage where you’re kind of in between, you’re thinking a little bit about it, but some of it’s automatic. So that’s how you do it. You work on all these things separately and your skills get better and they become more optimized and they’re more consistent. And then eventually they become autonomous. 

So another way to think about it, it’s like in the cartoons where the cartoon character is tempted in making a decision, and there’s a little angel and little devil that sort of pop up on their shoulders. And it’s as if the angel and devil, they’re like two little characters inside that person’s mind or their soul, kind of like pulling them in each direction. Well, it’s almost like you could think about each one of these skills that you’re doing at the same time, they’re like little characters. It’s like, “Oh, well, here’s the little birl, little character, and then here’s the blowing character and here’s what tune comes next character.” So there’s all these little entities. This is all hypothetical sort of metaphoric here, but it’s as if they’re these little entities and you train each one. When you practice, “I’m going to work on my blowing. I’m going to work on my blowing. I’m going to work on my squeezing. I’m going to work on my birls. I’m going to work on my memorization.” And you focus on that thing with the goal that when you’re playing, and when you can think about one thing, and you’re blowing or your birls, or your crossing noises, or your memorization, that those little elements, that they do the right thing even when you’re not with them, even when you’re shining the spotlight of your attention somewhere else, that you’ve practiced them properly and sufficiently so that they do what they’re supposed to do automatically. 

OK, let’s keep looking here. “Yeah, well, your pipe should be easy for you to play.” That’s a direct quote from Malcolm McCray, who’s an Australian piper who lived in Scotland for many years. Top prize winner, respected judge. And at a piobaireachd workshop that I was at with Malcolm years ago, he said the exact words, “Your pipes should be easy for you.” And what that means is that you want to have them optimized. There’s a lot of things that go into that. So you can watch my YouTube video called “Why Are My Pipes So Hard?” There’s lots of reasons your pipes can be hard. But if they’re easy for you, everything has to be right. Sizing, blowpipe, sizing of bag, proper drone reeds, good drones, drone reeds optimized, adjusted, pipe chanter reed with the Tone Protector. So it’s got the right amount of moisture, the right strength. It’s a good reed. It’s efficient. It’s been broken in. And you, you have to be in shape. You can give a perfect set of pipes to someone, absolute optimized pipes. But if you’re not in shape and you’re rusty or your physicality isn’t there, it’s not going to work. So you have to be in shape. Your pipes have to be dialed in. You’re working together. Your pipes should be easy for you. That’s the secret. So you look at a top player and they’re just busting out complicated tunes or the most beautiful piobaireachd with every note just perfectly dialed in. How do they do that? A lot of practice, but they’re probably in the zone. They’re feeling comfortable. Everything is dialed in. They’re not struggling and hoping, right? 

I read a very interesting book a couple months ago, and it was written by a former Google data scientist who’s obsessed with basketball, sports in general. And he looked at all the statistics, like the entire statistical record for the National Basketball Association, our professional league here, and did all this data analysis on it. And the book is called “Who Makes the NBA?” All kinds of really interesting statistics about height and hand size and different physical attributes that they measure and what is predictive of success and sociological factors. Is it an advantage to be from a certain background? Is it an advantage to have a father that played in the NBA? All kinds of really interesting statistics. Well, one thing that he looked at was the ability to perform under pressure. So the ability to perform under pressure would be, in basketball, what’s your shooting percentage in the last couple of minutes of a game when it’s within five points? And they compare that to every other time. So they can define what’s a high-pressure clutch situation based on the score and how close it is to the end of the game. And then they look at how well a player does there compared to everything else. And this was an amazing statistic to me. They found that zero players are better in the clutch. That they found no NBA player who is better under pressure than when they’re not under pressure. They found some players that were the same. And those were the great players. The great players are the ones that whatever their shooting accuracy is throughout their whole career, when it gets to the crunch time at the end of a game, under pressure when it’s close, they’re the same. Nobody gets better. Most people get worse. They are not as good under pressure when the game is on the line. So that is a really interesting statistic to me. And that matches with my experience, which is, if you are in a competition scenario, you should not expect that you’re going to do better when it really matters. 

Like if it’s a big competition, it’s the gold medal, it’s the World’s, maybe it’s just a performance you’re doing. It’s a non-competitive performance but you really want it to be good, do not expect that it’s going to be better than what you’ve been doing before when you’re not under pressure. So that informs us if you want to do well when it really matters, you need to be doing well in the days and weeks and months leading up to it. So in SFU we had the saying “cruise and win” and “cruise and win” means you have to be at that level of performance to win going into the thing. Don’t expect it. “Oh gosh, we’re getting close now, it’s going to get great at the end.” It just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen to elite basketball players. It’s not going to happen to you. 

All right, we’re getting close to the end here. “What is the simplest definition of piobaireachd?”

Great question. So piobaireachd is a Gaelic word which literally translated means “bagpipe music.” But we refer to it as a type of bagpipe music in which the tunes are long, maybe five or seven minutes up to 20, 25 minutes. And they consist of a theme and variations. The theme is typically quite slow and involves a lot of nuanced phrasing and expression. And then with each variation, it has the same basic melody that you heard in the ground. And you represent those melody notes in a slightly different way with a different rhythmic context, different embellishments and gracenoting, and a different tempo. 

So there are tunes that have a ground in one variation. Typical would be a tune with a ground and maybe between five and 10 variations. There are tunes that have even more, maybe up to 20 variations. So a variation might be a taorluath variation. So you play all of the notes that came across in the theme in the ground, but then you play them with a taorluath on each note. Or a crunluath variation, which would be your melody notes with crunluath. There’s a variation called a dithis variation where it’s your theme note and a short low A. There’s a siubhal variation where you play your theme note and then a higher note. There’s a really cool variation in a tune called ‘Fair Honey,’ where you have your theme notes and in between each one you have a jili, which is a high A doubling. So there’s all kinds of really cool different types of variations. These piobaireachd tunes are still being written, but many of them are quite ancient, hundreds and hundreds of years old. A lot of our great tunes came from the McCrimmons who are on Skye and the McCrimmon family. They were the hereditary pipers to the McClouds and for many generations they had a piping school up on Skye and wrote a lot of these fantastic piobaireachd tunes. There’s still new tunes being written. 

This book came out a couple years ago, the Shasta Collection. And this was a compilation of the tunes that were submitted to a tune writing competition. And I wrote a few of the winning tunes. The first one I wrote was for my teacher, Collin McKenzie. It’s me and Collin, and it’s ‘Collin McKenzie’s Salute.’ So written in the old style, I didn’t try to make them sound particularly modern. I wanted to try to write a tune that was in the style of the classic piobaireachd. I’m not sure on the exact number of piobaireachds that we have, but in terms of that canon of tunes, excluding the modern piobaireachds, I think we have probably 250 to 300. So really, really cool. And it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but the pipers who love playing piobaireachd, they really love it. I think some of them might disagree with me, but I think it’s some of the most challenging and most interesting and most satisfying music to play because of the subtlety and the expression that you get to put into it. So if you want to look up some tunes, some great tunes that I recommend you look up, one would be ‘The Lament for the Children,’ ‘The Lament for Donald Dougal Mackay,’ ‘I Got a Kiss of the King’s Hand,’ ‘The Lament for Patrick Ogg McCrimmon,’ one of the all-time greats, it really features this high G note, which is a very mournful note. And some beginner piobaireachds, the first tunes that I usually teach people, is a tune called ‘The Munro’s Salute.’ Another tune is called ‘The Little Spree.’ ‘The Munro’s Salute’ and ‘The Little Spree’ I have for download in my shop. It’s a tune lesson download, you get the sheet music, recording of me playing the tune, and also a recorded lesson of me talking through the tune. I also have in my shop a lesson, it’s actually recorded of a masterclass that I gave on one of my all-time favorite tunes called ‘Too Long in this Condition.’ ‘Too Long’ is also on my album Bagpipe Revolution. And I did it as a duet through multi-tracking. I recorded the melody part, and I recorded a harmony part for it. And I really love that track because it’s something that I’d always wanted to do, which was to play a piobaireachd and then record a harmony part with it, and get the harmonies really, really tight.  You get some really cool sort of sonic kind of effects with the full rich lush sound of the bagpipe played in harmony. So you have two chanters going and six drones going.