Teach yourself Scottish bagpipes scale exercise 4 - high pitch

The idea is that if you can play the last three exercises on the instruction page along with the video...you can move on to the next section.

There are more explanations on the site, more exercises and lots of tunes, old and new, and a virtual pipe band.

You can also learn Scottish Smallpipes using the site and medieval bagpipes. All free of charge!

Playing any instrument is pretty well based on the same principles; moving the fngers up and down in a certain order in a certain time - the order is technique and the time (rhythm) is music. By corrupting the time we make personal music. Thus, technique can be programmed and guaranteed like programming a computer. Like with a computer actions are very close together in time but not simultaneous. By doing this programming effectively, we can guarantee our technique and use the spare energy on controlling our music.

Liszt played one note, seven times in a row correctly, and when he had achieved this, he added the next note, and so on until the entire piece was done.

There are five stages in learning to play something:

-Basic programming of fingers (X+O from how to play chapters)
-Grouping the instructions (mark which things go together)
-Assigning time markers (beats and smaller units) to the groups of instructions
-Making the time (tempo) even, steady
-Speeding up

Each and every step should be practised seven times in a row correctly. This is very hard at the beginning but gets easier with time. The early stages of learning with this method seem to take forever, but the result is vastly accelerated learning later on.