When The Battle's O'er, high pitch half speed

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1. The grip into the first bar is enough tricky that this tune doesn't really belong amongst a selection of tunes for beginners, though it is always traditionally amongst the first tunes to be learned, and is certainly one of the most popular tunes out there. This grip first into two thirds of the 16th note, with the B before it taking one third of this. You need to practise this slowly and gradually speed up, and then it won't be difficult.
2 There are two lengths of gracenotes - four tails for big ones and five tails for small ones. The small ones happen inside beats whilst the big ones are introducing beats. This very much shows the way in which gracenotes function and achieve their grammatical reason to be. If you are wondering what this means...please go to the gracenotes and strikes page http://www.teachyourselfbagpipes.co.u...
3 The D gracenotes in the penultimate bars of each part do not follow this rule. They are bigger gracenotes, with only four tails. The reason for this is to make a more staccato and pointed effect, for the semiotic purpose of showing the end of the part. As ever , listen carefully to the videos to get this.
4 The low G gracenote to low A is always a small gracenote. You can make this work by trying to 'feel' the low G in your fingers, and the moment you can feel it, open to low A.
5 The grips in bar 4 of each part are different to the introductory grips, and they fill up the space of a 16th note.


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.