Just had my first lesson with Jori since he's been back from Scotland.  It felt great to get back into some sense of structure.  I'll be seeing him twice a month from here on out, but instead of in person we'll be doing lessons over the Internet.  This will save me a considerable amount of time since I won't have to leave the island to see him.  I'll probably set aside every 3rd or 4th lesson to meet with him in person but for now the Video chat thing will do the trick.

For this lesson we put the Kinnaird Bass reed back in my pipes and got it tweaked so it sounds really good, and the tenor's are also set too.  I suspected my top hand notes were a bit sharp with my current chanter reed and I was right, the High A and E were a bit sharp so Jori taped those notes to flatten them out.

I wasn't expecting to play the pipes on this lesson but the reed setup thing went pretty fast and before I knew it I was huffing and a puffin away, whew, what a work out!  With about 15 minutes left to my lesson we then moved on to the practice chanter and he had me go through the Jig I've been working on, nothing new there, just need to keep doing my exercises, esp GDE's (for Jigs and Reels).

One of the tasks I was given was to create a list of tunes, those I know, tunes I'm working on, and some I'd like to learn.  It should be a good mix of Airs, Marches, Strathspeys, Jigs, Reels and maybe even a hornpipe!  I have a list, its pretty long so I'm listening to those tunes over and over to whittle it down a bit to, say around 10 or 12 tunes.

I'm looking forward to getting structure back into my practicing and making some forward progress again.