At that point, it was primarily Skype. It’s a fascinating article, and it’s very fun to be on the front page of the New York Times, and have my picture on there. What I didn’t realize, (since I was just busy doing my thing and teaching and, you know, running my business, and this just came out two weeks before my first son was born, so I just kind of focused on family and piping and work,) was this was a big trend globally.  It was really sort of for me learning that the idea of online music education wasn’t just something that I was doing, but this was happening all around the world in different types of music. 

Students love it because you get access to great teachers or a teacher that you connect with and you’re not stuck just having a teacher that’s local to you. Teachers love it because you can access so many more potential students. 

What we see now is not only in piping, but in all areas of education, really, that online education is a huge, huge thing. So that’s 2003, and then I was ticking along teaching in person, private lessons here in Seattle, working with bands, traveling to teach workshops and piping schools, and also teaching these one-on-one lessons on the webcam. 

Then another big change for me was in 2010~2011. I was really getting into doing yoga and you know, people go through different sort of exercise phases in their life and I got a friend who introduced me to yoga.  One of the things that this yoga studio was doing was they did a 30-day challenge.  The idea is, can you come and do one of these classes every day for 30 days? It’s fun and I did it and I loved it. 

I thought, “Wow, I wonder if I could do something like this for pipers?”  So that was the inspiration for me. I think it was 2010~2011. I put on the BagpipeLessons.com 30-day piping challenge.  I just put it out on my website and I had a blog at that point, and I sent it to my email list, and what do you know? 

Over a hundred people signed up! Then I thought, “Well, I’ve got to figure this out. I’ve got to create a course curriculum here!” I wasn’t sure how it was going to work, but basically I did an online lesson or a challenge every day for 30 days. 

Sometimes it would be a PDF or an exercise or tune or some kind of practice challenge. And it was really cool. And people really loved it. And It was very satisfying. I felt like this was a great use of the internet and email and this blog format to bring people together.  There’s a lot of collaboration and remember blogs?  people would post comments and all that kind of stuff. 

So it’s really cool. And then that was the inspiration for me to create the BagpipeLessons.com Studio that still exists today.  The studio is a lesson library with hundreds and hundreds of lessons on basically every piping topic: tunes, exercise, technique, fingering, expression, tuning, blowing, reeds, equipment, product demonstrations, reviews, all that kind of stuff. 

I created it as a way to have a single repository where I can put all the cool stuff that I’m working on if I have any exercise or a new tune. If I am teaching a workshop somewhere, teaching a seminar or masterclass, I could record it and put it on there.  Sort of like a one-stop-shop for me to put all this great content in there.  Then members can just sign up for a monthly or yearly membership and get access to everything. 

That was ticking along great but I always had this idea in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something extra for my members. That kicked off in 2020, which is an unusual year as you probably remember. 

In 2020 I created a membership called the BagpipeLessons.com Inner Circle. The Inner Circle combines the membership in the Studio. So you get access to the lesson library and you also get the weekly live classes that I do on Zoom. 

That was a great thing for BagpipeLessons.com and for my students, to get on the Zoom bandwagon. We did that in 2020, when everyone was getting on Zoom, and we’re still doing it. I lost track of how many of these live classes we’ve done, but hundreds. 

When you sign up for that Inner Circle membership, you get access to the lesson library with hundreds of lessons that were formally called the Studio. You can also access the weekly live classes and all those live classes are recorded so you can go back and watch them all. 

I’ve heard from one of my students who’s gone back to the very beginning and is watching every single one of these one-hour Inner Circle live sessions in order. He says it’s kind of like watching a Netflix show. He’s just binge watching it and gets to watch as the the content and the lessons unfold and and gets to know all the people that are in the Inner Circle. 

So that has been really, really cool. If you’re interested in that, you can check it out at BagpipeLessons.com/membership. We have people from around the world, all different time zones and ages and ability levels. 

It’s been a really cool thing to have some community there. And the Inner Circle has really helped me fulfill my vision for BagpipeLessons.com, which is to bring high-quality information and inspiration and community to help people fulfill their dream to learn the pipes.  I really look forward to these weekly sessions. Many of our members don’t tune in live. They watch the recording if the timing doesn’t work for them. 

We have a private Facebook group, so you can watch it on a Facebook Group. You can join live on Zoom and then you can watch the recording later. It’s really cool. One thing I would like to do is to have an Inner Circle in-person gathering at some point.  We’ve got to figure out where that’s going to be. 

We have people all over the world: UK, Europe, gosh, almost every continent.  I don’t think Antarctica but Australia, New Zealand all across the US and Canada, Hawaii, Alaska.  So it’d be fun to get us all together at one point.  

Those are some big sort of milestones for my business. I would say the other really big thing that changed BagpipeLessons.com in my life is the success of my products. If you’re on my email list or you’ve been watching some videos on the YouTube channel, you know I’m trying to let people know about some products that I use and some products that I’ve invented that have been very helpful to pipers. 

Probably the most famous one is the Tone Protector. So this is my humidity-controlling reed cap. It’s 84% just where it’s supposed to be. Fantastic. And I have a whole line of Tone Protector products that allow pipers to deal with the challenge of having cane chanter reeds and the fact that they are very temperamental and very sensitive to the moisture content in that cane, in the natural material. 

So it’s been really, really amazing. And I’m just so happy and honored and pleased and grateful to everyone who’s using the Tone Protector. I hear from people almost every day who just love how their Tone Protectors helped them enjoy piping more with less messing around with reeds, less time tuning, and just more time playing and practicing and enjoying playing. 

I was talking to Willie McCallum in January, when we were judging together in Kansas City at Winter Storm. Willie’s one of the all-time great pipers, a great guy, also a teacher and mentor of mine. I had this theory that I asked Willie about.  I said, “You know your generation of players, you guys have all had these incredible careers that have been like 10 or 20 or 25 years longer than the careers of the generation before.” He said, “That’s absolutely true,” and he shared a funny story with me.

He says that when he was 40, he thought “Well, I don’t think I’m going to be competing much past 45.”  I don’t know exactly how old he is, but he is well past 45, and he’s still playing and competing and playing better than ever. 

I said to Willie, “I have this theory that I haven’t seen anyone talk about, but my theory is that all of this technology in terms of equipment has really helped your generation of pipers extend their careers.”

We have had big innovations like synthetic zipper bags with moisture control systems and synthetic drone reeds instead of the traditional cane drone reeds. Someone actually mentioned to me, they think the Tone Protector is right in that category of world-changing innovations for piping.  I was very flattered and honored to hear that comment. 

I said to Willie, “That’s my theory.” And he said that is 100% true. He said in the old days with sheepskin bags and cane drone reeds and all this temperamental, natural, finicky equipment, he said you could easily spend four days practicing and not actually even play a tune because you’re just messing with all your equipment. 

So he just confirmed to me that, yes, all these amazing technological advances in terms of the equipment of bagpipes has allowed you to take breaks throughout the year and come back and just sort of hit the ground running and get back to playing.  He also said that your practice time is actually way more efficient and productive because you’re not spending all that time messing around with your gear. 

That was a great conversation and it also encouraged me to know that these innovations people are coming up with, these products that I’ve been working on and continue to work on (I have more things that I’m working on right now) that these products are important not just for convenience but really to help pipers do what they want to do and do more of it.  Which is practice and play and perform and put out great musical performances. Even with all these innovations, there’s still plenty of time spent, and still plenty needed to get into the gear and the adjustments and to set up the instrument side of things. 

So don’t worry, that’s never going to go away. If you love to tinker with your equipment, that definitely is always going to be there. I think of it a little bit like how we have athletes now, these professional athletes and their careers are much, much longer than they used to be because of better training methods, better safety equipment. With American football, you’ve got the better helmets and pads and various braces and stuff. Also better physical therapy and medical innovations that help people recover from injury better. 

Pick your sport, whether it’s American football, soccer, F1 or golf or whatever, you will see athletes, both men and women, having longer careers.  Some of these all-time-greats really can have greatly extended longevity in their career, and I think it’s equipment, but I also think it’s the ability to recover. 

And for me, that’s kind of like the bagpipes. If you think about the instrument as part of you, and how you perform these technological innovations, in terms of equipment, it allows you to recover quickly. 

I definitely have some more products I’m working on. Thank you to everyone who’s using Tone Protectors and my new microphone that came out just over a year ago is very quickly catching up to the Tone Protector in terms of popularity. So thank you to everyone for supporting my business. Although I know you’re not doing it to support me, you are doing it because these products really work for you, and I hear that every day, so thanks. 

I want to talk about the future of BagpipeLessons.com and of this YouTube channel. If you’ve been following my YouTube channel or if you’re new to it, check it out. I’ve got all kinds of different videos I put on there and there’s all kinds of different topics. 

Somewhere I have a list of probably a couple hundred ideas for either lessons for my members, topics for one of my live sessions for my Inner Circle, or for a video for the YouTube channel. And they pretty much fit into three main categories. This is a way to think about all the stuff that you need to learn and master if you want to be a piper. 

One is the fingering. So everything that’s related to technique. We have proper form: how you put your hands on the chanter, gracenotes, our doublings for low G bass movements, the birl, crossing noises. Everything has to do with technique, a lot of that we do on the practice chanters. That’s a really big topic. I think a lot of pipers spend a huge amount of time on our technique. I will just give you a little hint. 

I have something that’s coming out later this month. I’m recording this in March of 2024, and I have something that is coming up that I am very excited about later this week. It’s going to be a new online course. 

So check that out. So we got the technique. That’s all about the hands and the fingers. We also have the tone side of things. A big part of it is equipment and technology. Another big part is the skill of the sound production. 

There we’re talking blowing, right? So it’s really a huge thing, and it is unique to the bagpipes.  Not the fact that we blow, or that we create intonation through blowing, but the blowing and the squeezing the bag, and the blowpipe, and we have four different reeds:  that is not something you see in other instruments. 

It really is a big topic. If the technique is in the hands and fingers, the tone is the body because it is the lungs and diaphragm and cheeks and your physical stamina and the arm for the squeezing. 

Also the tone production side of piping involves all of your equipment. So this is bags, moisture control systems, setup, maintenance, hemping, making sure all your joints are airtight, and tuning. 

Tuning is another skill. And just more equipment like using my InTune Mic, using my Tone Protector, my Tone Protector Reed Case to protect the humidity levels in your reeds. So we got technique, we’ve got tone. 

If you think about a triangle, at the top is the musical expression part. Music, that’s how we get into this, right? If you’re like me, there’s something about when you heard the bagpipes, and maybe you were so young, you don’t even remember. 

I was like that. I can’t remember a time before loving the sound of the bagpipes. I can’t remember the first time I heard the pipes, but I just remember being a kid and seeing those pipers and thinking, “I want to do this.”  I don’t know why. There’s this idea that you don’t pick the instrument, that the instrument picks you, and I definitely feel that way. Who knows? Here we are. But for most of us, there’s something about the sounds and something about music that just grips us. 

That was certainly the case with me. For the musical expression side here, we’re talking about your tune selection, your tempo, your expression, your phrasing, your pulsing, your dot-cut, the smoothness of your eighth notes, in your jigs getting the right amount of dot and cut in your six eight marches.  It’s all about the music and if the technique is in the hands, and the tone comes from the body, the music comes from the heart or mind. And really that’s the goal: that your technique is solid and consistent; your tone is solid, and you have pipes that are easy to play, that sound good, that stay in tune. 

And those two things allow you to deliver a musical performance. That’s really the goal. So there’s these three big areas: technique, tone, and music. If there was a fourth area, I would say it is the performance psychology side of things.