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…

Congratulations to Dave Mason on winning the John Cruickshank VC composing competition. I think his tune is one that will be played and thus serve the memory of a true war hero. It was a very difficult competition to judge made all the easier working with legendary figures such as Ian McLellan, Richard Parkes and Stuart Liddell. On going through the entries one was struck by how difficult it is…

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…