Category: Reviews

Pipes & Drums Feature at Dollar Bicentenary/ Thoughts on Donald MacDonald Cuach

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Our Dollar Academy correspondent has sent this….A remarkable 243 pipers and drummers gathered at Dollar Academy, Clackmannanshire, over the weekend to kick off the start of the school’s bicentenary year. With a parachute team arriving with the special bicentenary flag, which will fly over the Old Playfair Building this year, current band members and scores of former pupils (many in mature age ranges) got together to parade on the lawns…

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Delaware to New England – Editor’s Letter from America

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We are now well into the week at the New England Pipe & Drum Academy. Small but perfectly formed, with friendship, wonderful food and hard study the unfailing mix for a successful week. Tonight Tommy (Johnston) and I are off to the Stuart Highlanders band for a workshop. This is the band which recently had a Grade 1 standing but who are now down in Grade 5. How things can…

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Review of Grade 2 at the UK Pipe Band Championships

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Some say his Ulster fry is as dry as an Arabian sand shoe….others that his flashes of brilliance are in his hose tops…..yet more that his utterings and muttering are those of a havering Hector – and anything but heroic. But he is our firm family favourite and you just gotta love him…He is, after all, the one and only MacStig…… I think it was those 1970s heavy duty philosophers…

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Preview of the Grade 2 UK Championship in Belfast

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Some say his granny was a welder on the Titanic with a mouth to match….that he has inherited her vocals and can be heard howling down the slopes of Black Mountain every full moon……that to him using his loaf is launching lumps of Veda at Lough Neagh’s birdlife. All we know is he looks like this…. Raincoat, check, umbrella, check, sun cream, check, ferry ticket….there’s always something you leave on…

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A Look Back at Early 2018 Outdoor Pipe Band Competitions

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By Alistair Aitken OBE, former RSPBA Adjudicator and not MacStig! Now that the RSPBA’s 2018 outdoor pipe band competition programme is in full swing I have been asked to give general views about some of the contest venues and observations about results etc., with a historical slant where possible.   The outdoor season started with a bang with five outdoor competitions over the same weekend – Dunbar and Bangor (Northern Ireland)…

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