The Truth About D Throws, Who Can You Trust? Faster Fingers, Practice Time Hacks & More!
by Jori Chisholm, Founder of BagpipeLessons.com
Last Updated: June 9, 2025
In this informal Q &A session we tackle the questions you’ve been emailing, commenting and DM‑ing about—everything from choosing the right bag size to beating practice‑time burnout.
We dig into trusted sources of piping info, debate heavy vs. light D‑throws, troubleshoot ergonomics, scheduling, mindset, staying fit for steady blowing and loads more.
Watch the video and scroll down to read the full video transcript.
Topics Covered in this Video:
Sources You Can Trust • How to separate piping folklore from proven technique • Where to find top‑level, up‑to‑date instruction online and off?
Technique Tune‑Ups • Heavy vs light D‑throws—does it really matter? • Keeping finger dexterity with age
Ergonomics & Comfort • Choosing a bag size and blowpipe length that match your body • Posture checkpoints for your arms and neck
Sound & Fitness Connection • Why does aerobic conditioning and muscles strength make piping easier? • Quick daily exercises to extend playing stamina
Practice & Motivation • Structuring sessions when you’re short on time • Keeping the spark alive
Video Transcript: I was sitting out here on my back deck doing some work this morning, working on some lessons and doing a little bit of reading and thought, let’s just go live. So I’ve been doing these YouTube Lives from my home studio, which is inside, down in my windowless studio down there, and I thought this would be kind of fun and different to do out here.
So for those of you who’ve been following my channel here, I’ve been putting out a lot of videos over the last year and a half or so. And I’ve been doing some of these live videos. I’ve been getting some great comments and great feedback and then answering some of your questions. So I thought I’d go over that today.
On my website, when you sign up to get one of my free guides, I’ve got these informational PDF guides you can download on tuning and reeds, blowing and practicing, and online lessons and all that stuff. When you sign up for those, I will follow up with an email asking, “Hey, did you get your download?” And, “What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve been facing in your piping?” And I get some great responses. I’ve got a whole bunch of questions and responses from you, which are questions to me, and I’m going to answer some of those right now. So if you’ve got a question that you want to just throw into the chat right now, go for it. It’s my first time doing this live on my phone here so we’ll just see if it’s going to work.
Lots of great questions here. So I’m just going to start at the top, and we’ll go through and see how many we get through. So number one, how can older beginners best navigate the overwhelming amount of piping information available? Well, that’s a great question so I think this goes for everybody. It could be related to piping or other things that you’re looking for online. You want to go with a trusted source. So there’s a lot of info out there and I see a lot of nonsense out there on the bagpiping internet.
A lot of this is people maybe doing the best they can to share what they think is the best information. But there’s a lot of bad info out there. And I would say that that is not specific to the internet. I remember when I was first starting to play, I was a little, I was small for my age.
So when I first started piping, I think I got my pipes around age 12. I was a really small boy, and the advice at that time was to get a large bag, a large pipe bag. And that was right when the first synthetic bags were coming out. So I remember I saved up my money and I got a large Canmore bag that was the Gortex bag and it was horrible. I knew it was horrible right away. It was just way too big for me. I was a tiny kid and it was impossible to play and I remember being in tears because I’d spent all this money and it just made my pipes worse.
So that was terrible advice then, and I don’t know where it came from. The advice at the time was “get a large bag, a larger reservoir of air.” I never really understood and still don’t understand why a larger reservoir of air would help anybody. So that’s a whole other topic on having a bag that fits you properly.
But really what you want to do is find a source that you can trust. So I founded BagpipeLessons.com in 1999, 26 years ago. The idea was to have a source of information for people who want to learn to play the pipes.
Hi Jacob. If you’re watching live, put something in the chat. It looks like it’s popping up on my phone here. This is great.
So I started the website to be a place for people to get information who want to learn the pipes and I couldn’t have predicted back in 1999 where we would be today with YouTube lives and Zoom calls and streaming and all these great opportunities that we have now with this technology.
But still, you want to find a source that you can trust. Check out my Learn page at BagpipeLessons.com/learn.
Hey chromazar!
I’ve got tons of free guides on there. I’ve got links to videos, all kinds of stuff. And it’s all free, you don’t have to pay for anything. Of course I do have products for purchase and online courses and my membership but there’s tons and tons of free information on there. Subscribe to this channel. I’ll be putting new stuff on here all the time. This is just a great platform.
So you want to find a source that you can trust. If you have a teacher or someone that you can go to for information in person or online, even better. You want to find a teacher that is someone who you can trust to give you good information.
I love it when my students will come to me with a question. They’ll say, “Oh, I was looking on the internet and I found this product,” or “I found this sort of method or this thing that I should do.” And I love it when they come to me because it means they’re interested and they’re motivated and they’re researching. But often the answer will be, “Oh, that’s interesting, let’s discuss that.” And often the answer is no, “That’s completely 100% wrong.” Or often the case is that there will be things that just don’t matter. People will get really excited, or worked up, or fixated on something. And then I can just say, it just doesn’t matter from my experience. Well, let me give an example:
A perfect example is the D throw. So we have 13 primary embellishments for the bagpipes. We have nine notes and nine doublings. Although three of those doublings we don’t really play that often: the low G, low A, and the D. So say we have six doublings we play all the time and four low G based movements, grip, taorluath, D throw, and birl.
So 10 main embellishments that cover most of our tunes, not including piobaireachd. The D throw is the only one that has two styles: the heavy D throw or the light D throw. I’m not going to go into all the details right now, but the heavy D throw has an extra low G in it. I did a research project years ago where I tried to listen to all the recordings I could find of world-class pipers and say how many played the heavy, how many played the light. It’s about 50-50 as far as I could tell. There may be some regional differences, but it’s about half and half so you can be a world-class player and play a heavy D throw like Alasdair Gillies or you can be a world-class player and play light D throw like Stuart Little or Willie McCallum. So it really doesn’t matter. And for every one of those pipers who really thinks that the heavy D throw is the way you have to do it, the light is for wimps or whatever, you have another absolutely world-class player who says, “Ah, you got to play the light.”
The heavy is ‘like pebbles being dropped on a tin roof’ I heard John Wilson say once. So it really doesn’t matter which one you play, you just pick one that you like or for whatever reason when you started with, and you get really good at it. So that’s important. But then people will say, “my pipe major says we all have to play heavy D throws because that’s what we’re doing in the band.”
My response is, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter.” You can play whichever D throw you want. And they’ll say, “Yeah, but he really says that everyone needs to play the heavy.” And my response to that is, if you made a list of a thousand things that you were going to work on for your pipe band: to play with good unison, good musical expression, great tone…if you’re going to make a list of a thousand things, everybody playing the same D throw would not even make the list because it really doesn’t matter. If your D throw is clean and played with precision on the beat, you can’t hear it if half the band’s playing heavy and half the band’s playing light. I would love it if somebody has a rebuttal to that and you think I’m wrong. Let me know But I’ll just tell you I played in the SFU Pipe Band. We were world champions. The band’s been world champion six times, three times when I was with the band. And it didn’t matter to us.
So I’ll just say from sort of the practical standpoint of playing at the high level and winning at the high level, it didn’t matter at all. Totally irrelevant. If you play a good D throw that’s nice and concise and on the beat, you’re there.
So that’s one thing that an experienced and trusted mentor and teacher can let you know and can set you on the right path. To give you more than information, and to give you more than feedback, but also to help you figure out what’s important. Because there’s certain things that are really important to work on, and other things that are irrelevant, and it’s really hard to know that.
It’s really hard to know that when you’re trying to figure it out for yourself, right? You talk to doctors. If you know anyone who’s a doctor, or maybe you are yourself, and this probably applies in other fields where there’s a high level of expertise that’s involved, but you talk to doctors, and they have to navigate this sort of patient interaction differently than they did 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. Because now people have their own ideas and they have the internet and they’re researching things and they’re looking up things and I think that’s great I think it’s really great that we can access all this information out there. But what it means is the doctors are having to spend some of their time, it’s not the old days of “just take my word for it.” It’s better that now you need to explain and have a discussion. But there will be conflicts where the patient’s saying, “well I read this and I want to do this,” and the doctor’s saying, “Well my expertise and my judgment tells me this.” So that’s one of the things is that when you have an expert, whether it’s your doctor, coach, or a mentor who you go to, who you trust, or maybe you’re even paying them money for their time and expertise and judgment. And the judgment is they are helping you figure out what are the important things that you need to focus on. So that’s it. Find an expert. Find someone you can trust and listen to them. Ask questions. Feel free to do your own research, but check in with them and that will set you on the right path.
Okay. What are some effective strategies to handle age-related declines in finger agility, accuracy, and tuning? So those are kind of different things. Let’s focus on the first two, finger agility and accuracy. Really what we’re talking about here is finger dexterity.
And if you’re watching, put a comment into the chat there. I’d love to hear where you’re from. If you have any questions there.
So a big thing with piping is finger dexterity. What you want to be able to do is move your fingers cleanly on and off the chanter so that you can execute those notes and gracenotes quickly, consistently, with proper technique, without missing things.
This goes for players of all levels, but it definitely affects you more as you age. And there’s the predictable sort of aches and pains and stiffness that can come with age. It’s really, really important that you play with good form.
If you’ve watched any of my videos, or you’ve had lessons with me, or you’re part of my Inner Circle, I talk about this all the time. It might be the most important thing when it comes to fingering technique and improving your dexterity and that’s good form: keeping your fingers as relaxed as possible with the minimum necessary tension, and keeping them nice and low and close to the chanter. So, loose and low.
The opposite of that would be a lot of tension and a lot of pressure and a lot of squeezing and a lot of excess finger height. So the problem with those two things is that you’re engaging the big muscles in your forearms and your hands are turning. It’s like holding onto something for dear life muscles as opposed to moving fingers quickly and precisely with independence, right? So from everything that I know about how our fingers work and the anatomy and the function, is that you have small muscles that allow your fingers to move independently. If you squeeze, you lose some muscles that allow your fingers to move independently. If you squeeze, you lose some of that finger independence. So keeping your hands relaxed is really, really important. If you’ve ever had anybody tell you to squeeze harder on the chanter for whatever reason, “Oh, you’ve got to get that low G on a grip,” “You’ve got to squeeze harder to hold a note,” “To hold that dotted note, you need to squeeze harder, push harder.”
That is terrible advice. Whoever that is, even if they’re some famous person, I would just have that discussion with them. That the key to precise fingering, clean fingering, consistent fingering, fast fingering is to have your hands relaxed.
If you think about it, what your hands are doing is they’re on the chanter and then they come up and they come back down. That really requires a very minimal amount of muscle. Really what you’re trying to do is control it, get the movements in a controlled fashion, but there’s a natural tendency to play with excess tension.
So when you read about how you’re supposed to ‘engage your core,’ if you’re doing some heavy lifting or something, they say, “Oh, you want to engage your core so you don’t throw your back out.” That’s great. Backpiping fingering is not like that. You do not need to engage all of the muscles around these finger joints to give them stability like you would if you were trying to lift something heavy.
What you’re trying to do here is move things precisely with very, very small margins in terms of the precision of timing. And you want to play a tune that’s a minute or five minutes or 20 minutes, or a whole performance or a medley or whatever.
So there’s this idea in exercise. You might have come across this in reading about exercise, but there’s this idea that you can measure how hard you’re pushing yourself, whether it’s lifting weights or running or riding a bicycle, in terms of how hard it feels. So it’s like a subjective feel, how hard you are working from zero to ten, ten being the absolute extreme. You can do that and it’s an effective way of measuring your fitness and also how hard you’re working in your workout just simply based on your subjective feeling of it. It’s called the Borg Scale of Exertion, I think. Anyway, it’s pretty interesting. I came across it in a book called Body for Life which is a great workout book which I recommend by Bill Phillips.
But you could also think about how hard you are working, like the amount of tension and effort you’re putting into your fingering. And the thing that we know from the Borg scale is if you’re doing like a level nine or a level 10 of physical exertion, say you’re running on a treadmill at a level 10, you basically can do it for about 30 seconds.
That’s like an absolute flat-out running for your life sprint. You can’t do anything else. You can’t even talk. Or the example of lifting weights would be when you’re doing absolute maximum weight, like on a bench press, and you’re just trying to do one rep and you can barely do it. You can’t talk. You can’t have a conversation. You’re just like absolutely, your brain and your body is just taken over by this one thing, it’s very short. Like 30 seconds on the treadmill, or one rep up on the bench press. With piping, we’re not doing one thing, we’re not doing a short thing for 15 seconds. We’re doing something for like minutes, many many minutes. Think about how long you’re going to play your pipes for.
So it’s less of a sprint or a maximum weight as it is a moderate to very low effort for a sustained amount of time. So on the Borg Scale of Exercise, a level zero would be like sitting on the couch. Level one might be standing or walking. Level two or three might be going for a walk, which you could do for 20 minutes or a half an hour.
Hey William, thanks for joining. So good afternoon to you, although it’s still morning here.
So while I’m talking about this Borg Scale of Exertion thing, you want to think about piping as not working really hard physically. You might be concentrating and thinking about where you are in the tune, working on your memory or your expression or your timing. But in terms of the physical exertion, you want it way, way, way down. You want it like a level two or level three.
So what that means is that your hands need to be relaxed so that you can do this thing over and over many many times over a long span of time. If you find that you’re working on an exercise, for example you’re working on your D throws and your bottom hand gets tight, that’s something to work on. Your goal is not to be able to play a few D throws with a tight hand, your goal ought to be to be able to play three minutes of D throws up and down the scale for five minutes and have your hands be relaxed. Because that’s what you’re talking about when you’re in a piping performance. Lots of movement with a high degree of precision over a long span of time.
So back to the question. What can you do to keep your fingering accurate and to keep that finger agility going even as you age?
Number one thing, good form. Keep those hands relaxed. Keep them in close to the chanter. That means you’re using the minimum necessary tension and the minimum necessary movement. That is really, really going to help you.
Also, you want to make sure that your pipes are set up to be as efficient as possible. So there’s a lot of stuff that goes into that. But if your bagpipe is too big, if the bag is too big, if the blowpipe is too long, if you’re leaking air, if your reeds are taking too much air, if your pipes are taking too much air, it’s going to make it harder to keep your fingers nimble and light.
One way to think about it, and this is a quote I got from the piper Malcolm McRae, “Your pipe should be easy for you.” I agree with that. Your pipes should be easy for you. That doesn’t mean they’re super easy, but it means that the pipes are set up to be comfortable and efficient. You also have to be in shape, right? If you haven’t been playing and you’re out of shape, well that’s going to be an issue. You’ve got to play every day or I would say minimum, absolute minimum, four days a week, preferably five or six. I think it’s okay to take a day or two off.
For many years I took weekends off and I would pipe Monday to Friday while the rest of my family was at work and school. Since I work from home, I could just take over the house and play. So I think five days a week is great. If you take a day off, that’s fine, but try to not take more than two days off. As soon as you get to that third day off, you start to fall behind.
Play regularly to make sure that you’re physically in shape. People have asked me, “Is there anything you can do to get more physically fit for playing the bagpipes other than just playing all the time?” And there is. Being generally physically active will help. So will doing weight-bearing exercises. This might be body weight-bearing, like doing squats and push-ups, dips on a chair. All those sorts of general body weight or weight-bearing exercises, whether you’re doing dumbbells or machines or whatever, and also getting your heart rate up.
So doing your cardio, going for brisk walks, jogging, swimming, all that stuff. So it’s nothing new. It’s not a big news flash, but anything that you can do to be physically active will help with your stamina for blowing the pipes and help those muscle groups for squeezing the pipes. And the more in shape you are, the less of a strain it is to keep your pipes going, which means you’re going to have an easier time doing everything else.
Whether it’s thinking about the memory work, with the musical expression, and definitely with the lightness on your fingering technique. If you’ve ever had that experience of playing your pipes and they feel super hard. Or maybe you got a brand new pipe chanter reed or maybe there’s something going on maintenance-wise, it’s really hard to play. On the flip side, every piper knows that you play better when your pipes feel good and they sound good right. It’s just comfortable and easy to play. So that’s what you want to do.
Okay, how do you choose the right bag pipe bag dimensions for proper ergonomics and comfort? All right we kind of alluded to that before. The sizing with bagpipes, like the sizes that they put on them are off, right? So you think, “I’m a large person.” I might look at my shirt and it says large on the tag. I should get a large pipe bag or I’m a medium person so I’m going to get a medium pipe bag. No, this is wrong. There’s probably somebody out there who absolutely loves a large pipe bag for some reason. But I don’t sell a large pipe bag. I don’t even sell a medium pipe bag.
In my shop the most common or popular pipe bags in the world are these Bannatyne hybrid pipe bags. Leather outside, synthetic inside. So it has the traditional feel of a leather bag but you don’t have to deal with seasoning. They’re very, very airtight. It’s like a Gortex-like breathable liner on the inside that’s really airtight. Fantastic bags. I play a small and sell a lot of smalls. There’s a slightly larger version which is called “extended small” and it’s not just small with an extended back, it’s actually slightly larger too. So if you want something just bigger than a small, you get the extended small. The largest size that I sell of Bannatyne is the Willie McCallum size. Willie’s a friend of mine, a very accomplished piper and one of the greatest of all time. He took a bag that’s more like a medium in the back, that’s bigger in the back, but in the front and the neck part, where your arm goes, it’s more like a small. So it’s kind of a combined version of a larger bag, but with this cutaway front.
A very, very popular bag. It’s too big for me, but a lot of people really love that bag. So I would say if you’re around six feet tall, I would look at that Willie McCallum bag as an option or even smaller. I have some students and piper friends who are well over six feet tall and they love the small bag or the extended small. The important thing to keep in your mind here, you’re trying to wrap your head around this bag pipe bag sizing thing, is that there is no advantage to a larger bag.
I’ll say it again: there is no advantage to a larger bag. There’s lots of disadvantages to a bag that’s too large for you. So you want a bag that fits, you want a bag that you can get comfortably up really high under your armpit and all the way back. I like my bass drone stock right here, flush with my shoulder and chest. So if the bag is too big, it’s like a beach ball. It’s hard to get that thing under there. If it’s a smaller bag, you can get it further up into your armpit and get your arm comfortably around it. So I really love the small bag. I do have a couple of custom bags on my website and by far the most popular one is the extended small with a longer neck.
I had a student who’s, gosh, I’m not sure how tall he is, about six feet, six foot three, I think. But the thing that he had struggled with is he said his arms were sort of long even for his height, and that he felt like no matter what size he got, it was in too close. Even large bags that he tried, they were in too close.
He liked the overall feel of the extended small, but he wanted to bring the arms out. So I worked with Bannatyne and we ordered a custom bag. It’s the extended small, but just the neck part goes out an extra two inches and he loves it. He’s actually bought five of those bags for his different sets of pipes and to have backups and spares and all that sort of thing. So if you’ve ever felt like your pipes are just a little bit scrunched in with your arm, then check out the custom extended small from Bannatyne with the longer neck.
You can only get that from my shop so I’ll put some links here down below. I just sold one of those this morning, someone bought their second one. It’s really about getting a bag that is the right size for you. I think for most people that’s going to be maybe smaller than what you’re used to. I spoke to a friend of mine who makes leather bags and he said he sells like one or two large bags a year. So they make them for people who are sort of stubborn or just stuck on this idea that they like a large bag.
I would encourage you, if you are in a pipe band or you’re around other pipers, and somebody has a different setup than you, take a look at it and ask them questions and maybe try it out. I love it when I can try the pipes of other players, especially if they have a great sound. If they’re a great player, I’ll say, “Hey do you mind if I try your pipes?” Often one of these top players they’ll say, “Yeah sure, go ahead. But just don’t make fun of me. My pipes are super easy.”
It’s a little secret that the top players have their pipe set up to be really comfortable. Your pipe should be easy for you. Think about it, you know when that piper comes out on the gold medal stage at Inverness on at Eden Court they’re going to play for 20 minutes. Maybe it’s a 15 or 20 minute long piobaireachd but then they’re tuning up for five minutes on stage and they’re tuning up for like 45 minutes before they even get there. So they’re playing for a long time.
So you’ve got to be in shape. Pipe’s got to be dialed in, but you’ve got to be in shape too. The other thing that I’ll say that’s really important in terms of sizing, in addition to the pipe bag size is the blowpipe length. So there’s some really great adjustable length blowpipes out there. I’ve got one in my shop from R.G. Hardie called the Adjustistick. Blow stick is another term for blowpipe. It’s adjustable length and what the adjustable length allows you to do is find the perfect length for you. When you’re playing your pipes, you want your forearms to be horizontal or very slightly down. If you look at professional pipers, that’s what you will see.
I was at a concert here in Seattle in February. All these top top pipers were here for this concert and just looking at them across the stage, they all have that same basic position: arms are out, forearms are parallel to the ground or slightly down.
If your blowpipe is too long, meaning the distance from your mouth to the top of the bag, what happens is either the whole thing pushes away from you, or usually it just pushes down. So look at other people to see whether those forearms are really reaching down. It’s extremely hard to squeeze the bag, and it’s also extremely hard to play when you’re reaching down.
I have some photographs of me as a little kid with my super long blowpipe. Head’s over here, and arms are almost straight. That’s a problem, so get that blowpipe nice and short.
This is cool. If you’ve got questions, just pop them into the chat there. This is great. How can busy adults develop and maintain a regular practice schedule with discipline? Okay. This is good for everybody.
Everybody’s busy these days, right? There’s just so much going on. So one thing you need to do is get it into your schedule. If you’re a very scheduled person, meaning you have a regular work schedule or a school schedule or a family schedule, if things are really predictable for you, you need to find a way to slot it in. If you are a person who has a varied schedule, you need to impose some structure and regularity on your life. I would recommend that you slot it in.
If you use a paper calendar, or you use an online calendar like a Google calendar, actually put it in there and keep it short. If you are struggling to find the time, or to find the regularity that you want out of your practice schedule, don’t get super bold and ambitious and grandiose with your plans. Keep it small. Say, “Okay I can schedule for 15 minute practice sessions this week, right?” And then you’re going to find where they’re going to go and you slot them into your calendar.
If you don’t use a calendar, put them on a post-it note and put them somewhere where you see them. If you have a phone that has an alert or a calendar reminder thing, you can use it. Or you could even have an alarm. I have a recurring alarm on my phone that pops up at a certain time Monday to Friday and a different time on the weekends for different types of tasks that I want to do. Sometimes I can’t do it exactly that moment, but I know that every day I’m going to get an alarm on my phone to do that thing. So maybe do that for other things: to feed the dog or to take your medicine or to remember to do whatever.
So figure out how to get three or four 15-minute practice sessions scheduled this week and the first step is to plan it. Then the next thing is to stick it on the calendar and then to get a reminder and then to actually do it. If you can’t find four 15-minute slots to practice, you need to really have a soul-searching moment with yourself and see if this is really something that you want to do or that you are capable of fitting into your life at this point. It’s okay if you can’t. Busy career, busy family, other things going on, health issues, I get it. We all get busy from time to time and other things will take priority. Things like family and work of course and health. Maybe you need to say, “Okay it’s not happening this month,” or “It’s not happening this summer, but come September 1st, once we’re back from summer vacation, or whatever, once the job changed…” But if you can’t find four 15-minutes in a week, then it’s not realistic that this is something that you’re really going to be able to get going here.
If you can, great. And then what you want to do is give yourself credit. You did it. If you scheduled those four and you fit them in, then that is a win. We’re not even talking about what you’re practicing and we’re not even talking about if you’re practicing the right thing or anything like that.
First thing is we’re establishing a habit, or we’re starting to establish a habit of what it means to get into a routine. And if you are a very structured routine person, this is a piece of cake for you. But it might not be. This might be a really big deal just to do that and to sit down. And if you’ve done it, that is a win. You get cookies and milk or whatever, a refreshing beverage of your choice, or some other little reward. You did it and really what you’re doing is you’re sitting down and you are trying to get better and you’re trying to pay attention to the things that need attention and you’re struggling. So give yourself some credit. The reality is, doing something hard like learning to play a musical instrument, your enjoyment of it is going to have a huge impact on whether you keep doing it.
Your enjoyment of it very much depends on your mindset. So a negative mindset might be, “Well, I’m never as good as I want to be,” or “I never got as much time to practice as I wanted to,” or “I wish this was easy for me,” or “This is so hard, I’m never going to get as good as I want to be.” True. But you have a choice of your mindset. Another choice might be, “I don’t have to do this, I get to do this,” “I don’t have to practice, I want to practice,” “I get to practice, what a joy and a privilege it is to be able to learn something new and challenge myself and see what I can accomplish, see what I can achieve.”
To me, that’s the starting point of a successful, enjoyable, fun experience. Learning to do something new, like playing a musical instrument, which is an opportunity. Not everybody gets that opportunity. So to be grateful, to be grateful for this day, to be grateful for the next 15 minutes that I have with my practice chanter, to try to make a musical noise, and to see if I can move a little bit in a certain direction.
So give yourself credit just for trying. You’re doing this because you like music. There’s something about it that calls to you and you like it, and you want to do it, so that means that you have good taste. You’re like, “Oh I like bagpipe music,” “I like music, I like the idea of being able to do something like this.” So you have the thought and you have the idea in your mind and that thought of what you could do or what you might be able to do. I know what you want to do is always beyond what you can do. You’re always going to fall short if you’re a beginner. And as you progress, you’ll be able to hear and appreciate and know what can be done. And you’ll know that you’re not there yet and there’s a gap. But instead of being disappointed or demoralized by that gap, be inspired by it and say, “Oh let’s see what I can do today to just move a little bit in that direction.”
I’ve been teaching my son. He’s 13 now and we’ve been doing lessons for several years and we do a lesson every single day. It’s a very cool experience. He’s super motivated and enthusiastic and he had the idea to do a lesson every day for 100 days, and that was a few years ago. I can’t even remember. I wonder if I have it written down here. I have my habit tracker here, and we’ve been tracking our lessons. So well over 1,500 days. Pretty amazing! We have not missed a single day. When I travel, we do it by zoom or FaceTime. Then if we can’t connect in person on that day because of travels, I’ll pre-record a lesson and he’ll record his response.
So very cool. And what I’ve learned from working with my son Colin is that you have to find a way for it to be joyful and fun. So our number one rule, we have three rules called Colin’s Rules, it has to be joyful and fun.
This doesn’t mean like fun, it’s not always super fun in terms of what you might think about as fun. What I mean is that you have to find something that is rewarding every day. And sometimes you learn something, and sometimes it is fun, and sometimes you have a breakthrough, and sometimes you learn something new.
But at the very minimum, you get the satisfaction and the enjoyment of doing it, of honoring the commitment that you made to do your practice that day. “I did it.” Sometimes that’s all you get, because it’s frustrating, or your pipes are hard, or you’re tired, or you don’t feel like it. But the fact that you were tired, and didn’t feel like it, and it was hard, and you did it and you didn’t give up. That’s a win.
Sometimes with my son, it’ll be super fun and we’ll have a great time. We’re playing stuff together and the pipes and learning new things and he’s having these ‘aha’ moments. Other days it’s just like there’s a long day at school or whatever and he’s just not feeling it, but we do it and we keep the streak going. So number one: have fun. Number two I’ll come back to. Number three is: learn something new. That could be actually learning a bit of information or learning a new tune or might be discovering something that you didn’t know. But the number two thing, just to backtrack, so what could be more important than having fun? Well it’s not as important as having fun, but what could be more important than learning something? That would be: do no harm. What I mean there is: you want to avoid making any mistakes.
Hi Mark, thanks for the comment.
So much of learning a musical instrument, and you know this if you’ve been piping, is that you make mistakes and they become ingrained as habits and then you have to fix them.
That’s what number two is on Colin’s Rules which is do no harm as best as you can. You can’t avoid it entirely but you try to. You try as best as you can to make sure that you’re learning things properly, if you are learning them, and you’re not developing bad habits that become ingrained, that you have to try to undo. That’s a really big issue. What that means is, take it slow, try to do things properly, keep an eye on form.
A classic mistake where you do harm is you really, really want to learn something. It’s like, “I really want to get this thing.” What ends up happening is that you’re focused on getting that grip for example, and the way you get it is by squeezing really hard on the chanter. So you’re technically getting the grip. It sounds like a grip, but what you’ve done is you have now mutated your technique to play really tight and you’re squeezing really hard in an attempt to get it.
Now you’re starting to develop that habit of a heavy, strong, clenched way of playing. So you want to get rid of that. So I would ask, what’s more important? Getting the grip so that it sounds like a grip? Or keeping your hands relaxed? I would say keeping your hands relaxed is more important because if you keep your hands relaxed and you keep them in close to the chanter, the two pillars of good form, and you keep practicing it, eventually you will be able to play it properly in terms of getting the right sound and you have good form.
It’s a problem that beginners have which is they really want to get the sound even if it’s just covering that low G. They really want to get the sound of it. They make that their number one thing, their absolute thing that they’re striving for is to achieve that sound of that movement or that note. Now they’re playing with too much tension. So what I would say as your instructor would be to focus on keeping the hands relaxed, then you get the sound. Now you’re on the right path. As soon as you play with excess tension, you’re creating a roadblock. You might get it, but now you’re blocked because you’re playing in that tight, hard way.
So keep your hands relaxed, keep them in close to the chanter, focus on those. Those are always your top priorities in terms of your technique. And the three rules, what are they? Number one: have fun, which means find something positive in every lesson because you have to do it. You should let me rephrase that. You don’t have to do it, this is something you do by choice, so you want to find a way to make it enjoyable. Sometimes you learn something, sometimes you have a breakthrough, sometimes the fun part and the enjoyment and the satisfaction is simply that you did your practice and then you come back to do it another day. So have fun. Number two: do no harm. Don’t want to get in any of those bad habits that become ingrained, that take a lot of work to undo. And number three three: try to learn something new.
Thanks everybody. I’m going to wrap it up here. We will say see you next time. Thanks everybody for watching. Thanks for the comments. If you’re watching this on the replay, just go ahead and put comments in there. Thanks everybody.
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For Tone Protectors and InTune Mics and all my products that you guys love, check out BagpipeLessons.com/shop. Let me know if this live thing works for you. This is super fun! Birds are chirping, the sun is shining, but it’s great to be here with you and talking about these important things.
Thanks everybody, we’ll see you next time. Mahalo.
Secrets to Make your Pipes Easy to Play
Pipers enjoy playing more when our pipes sound and feel great. Master your instrument with these powerful and quick tips based on my 30+ years as a piper and teacher.
quick tips
