The High Road To Gairloch!  That is my next competition tune.  I wasn't really planning on playing this particular tune in competition but the other march I have been working on (since September!) is still very rough.  In fact I put that march on the back burner for the last few months in order to focus on the slow air I played at the last competition. 

The High Road to Gairloch was the second tune I learned to play on the chanter, so I have 90% of the work done already.  What I am working on now is cleaning up the sloppy doublings and D throws, which this tune has an abundance of.  For the next two weeks I will focus on my C and B doublings, and even out my D throws, the rest of the tune is really simple.

Time to drag out the metronome!  I have a little love hate relationship with my metronome, but I know how important it is and when I use it a lot of the problems I seem to have with my tunes start sorting themselves out.

I'm still working on Maggie's Pancakes which is the Hornpipe Helen started me on last week.  Today at my lesson we didn't even touch the hornpipe, just High Road all the way.  I did get on the big pipes at the end of my chanter lesson, which was the first time in about 10 days or so.

It really sucks when I don't play the pipes regularly.  Helen doesn't like it one bit because it is very time consuming to get them to tune when they haven't been played in a while, in fact I don't even think we were able to get them tuned up properly because there just wasn't enough time.  Sorry Helen!

I will play this weekend though!  And hopefully I'll get to play a few days next week, or I'll be facing the wrath of Helen on Friday, shudder!