The Sweet Maid of Glendaruel, low pitch half speed

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A lovely, bright and simple wee tune. Give it some joy when you play it. There are several ways to embellish this tune, all of which may be correct according to their own logic. If someone in your band or friend group knows this tune already and plays it differently, it is not worth arguing about.

1 The grip at the beginning is just like in The Green Hills and When the Battle's O'er. The B is divided into three equal parts, the first third is given to the B and the next two thirds each have a low G, with a very short D gracenote cutting between them (proportion 3:1:4 if you want to listen carefully to that carefully on the videos slowly). This is the case for every grip.
2 The high G gracenotes are 64th notes, except for bar 7 in each part, where it needs to be lighter and thus shorter (a 128th note)
3 The doublings fit into the shape that the note is repeated (or 'doubled') after a 32nd note. This means the gracenote doing the cutting or doubling is one quarter of a 32nd note, and preceded by a note three times its length. These are horribly clumsy words for a fairly simple idea (New French Method word is Ta-fi)
4 The E gracenotes are also 64th notes.
5 The B strikes are also 64th notes, opening on the beat.
6 The throws all share the same characteristic of taking half the preceding short C and giving it to the low G, then opening the D on the beat and a very light tap making the second D sound a 64th note after the beat.
7 The birl is quite open, only giving the first repeat of the low A a 32nd note before the beat. This helps prevent the tune from galloping away in tempo.

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 practice more quickly, but more slowly.

To think again 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..

By remembering the five steps in learning (see how to practice), we can see that at the point when we assign time to our actions we can get better by increasing our sampling rate. We do this simply by dividing by two, and playing at half speed, with awareness of twice as many points in the beat. When we succeed at this level, we half our speed again, and double the number of places in the bar we try to feel and be aware of what is happening. We keep doing this until every gracenote can be measured opening and closing. If you know the 'New French Method' of rhythm, this helps dramatically, as it automatically gives us a sampling rate of four points per beat.

Start with a quick video (or a medium one) and when you feel you are playing with this nicely, go to a slower one, and try to feel more detail. First listen carefully, bearing in mind that most things are divided by two, to find where the actions occur. Obviously, when you accomplish this, go to the next slower file.

Once you have gone to the slowest file and played along correctly, start to go through the faster ones again to see how much more precisely you are playing, and hearing what you are playing.

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.

It's a simple set of tasks, the trick is in disciplining yourself to do it.