Scottish Schools Pipe Band Championship – Full Report

From our Juvenile Grade correspondent…….With almost 100 band performances across eight competition segments, it was a full pattern and a very positive sight to behold. Band members hustling and bustling along corridors from their respective warm up rooms to final tuning and three performance spaces. A wide spread of Grade 1 superstars coaching their charges and, in amongst those last minute alterations, tuning, coaching and the general buzz, many readers…

PP Editor’s Blog: New Book/ RSPBA Fire/ Scottish Schools

A new book of piobaireachd music is to be launched at the Piobaireachd Society Conference at the end of this month. ‘Pipers Meeting’ (the title comes from one of the tunes) is taken from the Campbell Canntaireachd manuscript and many of the tunes have never been published in staff notation before. The book’s compilers are Patrick Molard and Dr Jack Taylor, friends and  students of the ‘Bobs of Balmoral’, RU…

Preview of Scottish Schools’ Pipe Band Championship/ USPF Entry Alert & Judges for 2017 Contest

The 5th Annual competition moves to James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh this Sunday (12th March) for the annual competition. There will be over 80 performances with a record 81 bands, 11 quartets and freestyle ensembles in a variety of categories ranging from piping quartets for smaller groups to the top Juvenile bands going head to head for the Grand Prix. Bands from all over Scotland and the north of…

PP Editor’s Blog: Cape Breton Piping/ Chatsworth Entry/ Band Formations/ ‘Freestyle’ Piping/ Audio Archive

Listened to the BBC’s ‘Travelling Folk’ last night on Radio Scotland and an interview with bellows piper Hamish Moore. It was astonishing. No, not Hamish’s wacky views on how the British Army destroyed piping; how those old guys in tatty tweed jackets sitting playing on kitchen chairs somewhere in Cape Breton were the repositories of the true tradition. No, not that, but the fact that the presenter swallowed lock, stock…