Last month the Editor visited Johnstone Pipe Band’s practice hall and took the opportunity of interviewing P/M Keith Bowes Snr. about the band’s recent success and the foundation on which it is built. Johnstone is a small town near Paisley, south west of Glasgow. P/M Bowes: We are in our 76th year so we were formed in 1943. The original purpose of the band was to march the local Home…

Welcome back everyone and a Happy New Year. Scotland still sleeps/celebrates but we appreciate the rest of the world is back out there earning a living and requires the daily PP fix to relieve the ennui… A good call in our comments section regarding HLI tunes and Robert Reid’s book ‘The Piper’s Delight’. It is a smashing wee publication but is probably out of print, though I notice a copy…

Two notable pipe band devotees have been honoured in HM The Queen’s New Year’s Honours List. John Kelly reports: Mervyn Herron (above) from Northern Ireland said he is ‘over the moon’ after being awarded an MBE for services to the Royal Scottish Pipe Band Association (RSPBA) Northern Ireland.  The 67-year-old first joined the ranks back in the early 1980s and devoted over 30 years to the organisation before his retirement…

Welcome back! I hope everyone who celebrates Christmas had an enjoyable and fulfilling time. I can say, festivities excepted, that the judges for the John Cruickshank VC composing competition have been hard at work. P/Ms Ian McLellan, Stuart Liddell, Richard Parkes and myself have narrowed the 42 entries down to three finalists and will be spending the next couple of days identifying the best tune for the £1,000 first prize….

Bruce Beavis in Chicago: ‘I’m the P/Sgt for a start-up Grade 5 band and I was thinking about tuning practice chanters.   ‘I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the general topic of musicianship in bagpiping and wonder what your thoughts are.  ‘It seems odd to me that we treat the bagpipe like a musical instrument but spend most of our time practicing on a practice chanter that has…