Exercise for D strikes, rhythmical control and crossing sounds, low pitch half speed

Описание: his exercise is intended to help with strikes on D, managing different rhythms in a fairly straightforward situation and crossing sounds.

This exercise helps by establishing a figure in your hands that can be dropped into tunes anywhere.

Watch out for triple and 3:1 proportion (second and third bars of each cycle), as this can be tricky, but is very important to manage correctly.

If you want to really milk this exercise for more benefit, try playing it with your hands flat in the table, and close your eyes too. In a mixed group setting this can give many levels and layers of challenge - advanced players on the table and beginners or less advanced on chanters.
When you play with your fingers on the table you should try to imagine the sound your pipes make with each finger position.

How to practise

Solid bagpipe technique is not about being able to squeeze more wiggly bits into an ever smaller space of time. Solid bagpipe technique means that you can choose how long or short every finger movement will be (and why, according to your physical situation and musical interpretation), and the actions come out as exactly you want. These exercises are designed to make this happen, to give you total awareness and control over your embellishment rhythm by helping establish patterns in your brain.

The Magic Maxim:

"If you can play slowly you can play quickly, but the converse isn't necessarily true..."

This means exactly what it says - the better you become the more exactly you should be able to control what you are doing, and so to test ourselves, we shouldn't practise more quickly, but more slowly.

To think like computers - a sampling rate for a recording is a measure of how many times a second the computer will measure what is happening in the sound. A higher sampling rate makes for a higher quality of recording, up to a point beyond which it doesn't make much difference. It is the same with piping - the more times in a beat you can say exactly what is happening, the better your piping, up to a point..

Playing exactly with the midi files at a quarter speed is a fairly good test for a group, and this extra secret can dramatically affect the strength of playing within a band, and the confidence. It is true that using this approach, you can bring about a positive revolution in your band's playing and attitude.

So to repeat, as you get better and your finger and rhythmical control become more exact, you should go from the fastest videos...to the slowest.