Fearing the wrath of Helen on my weekly Friday lesson I played my pipes several times during the week and kept working on my old march for the up coming WPA competition on March 3rd.  I surely thought that my pipes, and instructor would be appreciative of my getting a few piping sessions in during the week.

Instead we worked on my old march "High Road to Gairloch" smoothed out some more of the bumps, focused on the doublings and D throws more, a fair amount of metronome work to help with giving the notes their proper time value.

The funny thing about Bagpipe music, and maybe this is true for other types of music, but you don't always play it like it is written!  These little "unwritten rules" are passed down from instructor to student and so on.  In time as you progress you put your own "feeling" or "expression" into the tunes you play, but the fundamental concepts are fairly constant.

Any how, I thought for sure I would be told to get out the big pipes and I was hoping my hard work all week would have paid off, but that wasn't to be.  Instead we started working on a new tune called "Muir of Ord" and I really like it!  Now I have two new tunes to work on, a Hornpipe called "Maggie's Pancakes" and a new 2/4 March called "Muir of Ord".

What fun!