With European time cracking along, our piping and drumming friends and colleagues drawn to North America for the Midwest Highland Arts Fund ‘Winter Storm’ weekend are underway in the competition segment of the event. The above picture shows winners from last year’s contest: Alastair Lee, Jamie Troy, both British Columbia, Canada, Alex Gandy from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Andrew Carlisle from Northern Ireland now Pittsburgh, USA, and Andrew Lee, British Columbia….

The following article was commissioned by PP Publishing for Pipe Band Magazine in 2005. Written and researched by piping historian Jeannie Campbell MBE, it traces the history of ladies’ bands from the 1930s onwards. Today, ladies have taken their rightful place at the top level in pipe bands but it was not always so…. The Braemar Girls’ Pipe Band (above) claimed to be the first girls’ pipe band in Scotland…

A new teaching item has been aded to the Piping Press Shop, writes the Editor.  Classic Strathspeys & Reels features many of the standard competition tunes. Each is played by myself at practice tempo and then closer to performance tempo on the practice chanter. This means the student can play along with the recording and get a good idea of how the tune should be presented. Here’s a free sampler:…

Planning for your summer of piping and pipe band music can begin! Today Piping Press publishes our first draft of our Highland games and solo piping contests – the Guide to the Games. Also published is the RSPBA calendar of pipe band events including the five major championships. Pictured top are Canada’s 78th Fraser Highlanders at the Worlds. The Association have split their calendar into monthly sections for convenience. On…

Fifty years ago P/M Donald MacLeod was intoning against learning piobaireachd ‘parrot fashion’. (See the advert he ran in the ‘Piping World’ magazine issue we highlighted last week.) This is the great danger in relying on CD or archive recordings as the sole source of your study. Almost as bad as following printed scores to the letter. Rote learning can only ever take you so far. An educated ear will…