Wednesday, November 8, 2017 by Madeleine King | Pedagogy

The key to success for any musical instrument (and indeed, for acquiring any new skill) is practice. Unfortunately, a lot of the time practicing feels like a chore, and it's easy to procrastinate the week away between lessons, only to find yourself frantically cramming an hour before class.

Here are some ideas to avoid that last minute cram-session, and lift yourself out of a skill-plateau:

1. Keep your instrument within reach.

Ever hear the expression "out of sight, out of mind"? That is true for practicing as well. You're less likely to do it if you have to go and dig your practice chanter out of your pipe case every time. Instead, keep your PC out on the coffee table, on your desk, in the car - wherever you'll spend some time wasting time (during commercials or waiting for the light to change - whatever). Practice scales, exercises, even do a little ear-training and see if you can pick out radio jingles, rock tunes, or whatever else you're hearing around you. 

I have the benefit of having several extra chanters that I sprinkle throughout the house... whenever I'm waiting for a pot to boil, I'm working on exercises or my competition 2/4. If you don't have that luxury, keep your PC wherever you waste the most amount of time - just don't forget to put it back in your case before your lesson!

2. Your smartphone is a great practice tool.

Most people carry their smartphone around with them, and these days, there is an app for just about anything. Need a metronome? Need a tuner? Forgot your sheetmusic? Most of the tools you might need while you're practicing can be downloaded onto your phone and then they're always at your fingertips.

3. Use your inner-voice.

Believe it or not, you can practice even without having an instrument in your hands. Try visualising you music in your mind. Run through it using a pencil rather than a practice chanter. Or just bring the sheet music with you and run through it silently. This is useful in situations where you know you will have time for practice but you can't make any noise. Or it can be used for those impromptu moments of free time that happen while you're out and about in daily life - say, in the waiting room at the dentist, or while you're riding the metro to work - and you haven't brought tools with you.

4. Gamify your practice time.

The concept of "gamification" is becoming increasingly popular for many different applications, for everything from fitness to crowd-sourcing. Why? Because it works. Making your practice time into a game makes it more fun, helps you to set goals, and helps you to self-assess your skills. 

First, decide what you are attempting to do - are you trying to memorize a tune? Are you trying to improve your technique? All of the above? Then, take those goals and break them down into milestones. If your goal is to commit a piece of music to memory, you could break it down into bars or phrases, for example. Next, you can assign points for each of the milestones - example, 1 point for each bar played successfully from memory. As you move through your practice, you give yourself a point-score. With each practice session, try to improve your score.

5. Mix it up.

Doing the same things every time you sit down to practice gets monotonous. Try something different - start the tune from the middle. Practice exercises in the reverse order. It's easy to plateau in your playing when you are bored. In fact, some studies show that if you add an additional challenge - for example, playing a particularly difficult passage while walking or standing on one foot - it will help your brain create additional neural pathways, allowing you to master a skill more quickly and more permanently [1].

Good luck and happy practicing!

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Wednesday, November 1, 2017 by Madeleine King | Bagpipes

There are many different opinions when it comes to how to best and correctly hemp your bagpipes. But haven't you ever wondered, like I have... "why yellow? Or for that matter, why black?" Really good question! Before we tackle that, let's look quickly at what hemp *is*, what it *isn't*, and what it's for!

How to Use the Different Types of Hemp

Loosely speaking, hemp is a type of thick thread used for cushioning and sealing joints on your bagpipe. There are three types that people generally keep in their maintenance kit:

- yellow, unwaxed,
- yellow, waxed, and
- black, waxed

Generally, the black, waxed hemp is thicker and stickier - most people use this anywhere on your bagpipe where the joint must remain sealed and immovable. For example, you would use this on the part of your drone that goes into the stock (this is a non-moving joint). You also would use black hemp on joints that tend to get wetter than the others - if you have a good moisture control system, really only your blowstick should be at issue here. Thicker, more well-coated hemp will suffer less rot than thinner stuff.

The yellow waxed hemp is usually used on joints that need to be airtight, but at the same time need to move. This is mostly your tuning pins, but many people also hemp their chanter tenon with yellow waxed hemp as well. The reason for this is twofold: 1) the wax on the yellow hemp is less sticky, offering much less resistance for these movable parts, and 2) the hemp itself is thinner, allowing you to add or remove *just* a little bit more humid days, or add the tiniest amount in the driest part of February (this tends to be more critical for movable parts, because with the parts that don't move you can feel free to load them up with hemp and not worry about them again - with the movable parts, you need to have just the right amount of hemp, always).

Unwaxed yellow hemp is used sometimes on practice chanters and on chanter reeds. Mostly, however, it is used by do-it-yourselfers who like to use shoemakers wax and paraffin wax to coat the different sections. By far, this is the absolute best way for the chanter tenon. The reason being: you can coat the first layer of hemp in black shoemakers wax so that it sticks very well to the tenon itself. Then mid-way through the wrap, you can use paraffin wax to make the chanter easy to remove from the chanter stock. This prevents the chanter from "spinning" inside the hemp because the inner layer does not adhere to the tenon. Shoemakers wax is far stickier than the paraffin wax that is used on modern-day black hemp. 

Unwaxed yellow hemp is pretty terrible on its own anywhere on your pipes, as it tends to absorb a lot of moisture, which causes swelling in addition to rot.

Why "Hemp"?

Contrary to what you might think, the "hemp" we use today isn't actually hemp at all - it's linen. We call what we use "hemp" because at one time, actual hemp was considered the best material to use in order to avoid rot.

In 16th century Britain, sailing vessels used oiled hemp fibers for rigging and even for sails, as it was most resistant to damage by water. Like ship-makers, pipe-makers required water-resistant materials in order to make their bagpipes last; it is likely that they were inspired by the ship building industry because of this similar need. During that time, Henry the VIII encouraged farmers to plant hemp to keep up with the steady demand for this material on ships up until the 17th century, when it was discovered that hemp grew much more easily in colonial America. Mass production of hemp fibers thus was largely moved overseas. [1]

In the early 1920s, a campaign against the use and cultivation of hemp was launched in America. The automotive industry had discovered biomass conversion and had begun producing hemp fuel - which angered competing industries and caused them to lobby against hemp, associating it with marijuana. [2] By 1937, the tax and licensing requirements for the production of hemp made it unattractive as a crop for farmers, who abandoned it altogether. [3]

This collapse in the market is likely what caused pipe-makers to search for new materials. But the reason we call it "hemp" is because in the beginning, it *was* hemp. Right up until the beginning of the 20th century.

Help from the Shoemakers

Now pipe-makers had to find a new type of threading material that was as resistant to rot as hemp, but also readily available and not too expensive. Fortunately for them, the ship-building industry wasn't the only one prioritizing water-resistant materials. In soggy, wet Britain, shoemakers cared about this A LOT. The thread used for sewing shoes together had to be sturdy, weather-resistant, and also smooth enough for sewing through leather. This was a natural match for pipe-makers.

Linen, made from the flax seed, has many of the same water-resistant qualities as hemp. In fact, when produced using similar techniques, linen and hemp are so similar that one would need a high-powered microscope in order to tell the two types of fibers apart. [4] In addition to that, shoemakers have a long history of using a coating on their linen threads to further improve water resistance (and facilitate sewing). This coating, referred to as shoemaker's wax, (incorrectly, cobbler's wax), "coad" or handwax, was initially just beeswax, and came into use in the middle-ages when shoemakers switched from thonging (made of gut) to actual thread. At some point, resin was added to help the threads stay in place, and then somewhere between 1200-1400 adding pitch instead of resin became the standard, while the earlier beeswax/resin blend was now used exclusively for lighter-coloured work. [5]

Essentially, by the time pipe-makers came along looking for new materials, shoemakers had perfected the techniques and were already using two types of wax coatings - a heavy black sole-thread with stickier pitch in it, and an amber-coloured, waxier thread for lighter work. Sound familiar? It should!

The "Hemp" of Today

Shoemakers hemp would have been naturally black (from pitch) and yellow (from beeswax and resin). But today, our linen "hemp" is mass produced by the textile industry and is all coated with paraffin wax. Paraffin wax is a translucent white colour, and so there is absolutely no reason that it has to be black or yellow except to follow tradition. 

Though we still use linen thread, certainly synthetic materials could be used, which would resist rotting and can come in any colour you might like. 

Traditionalists also like to buy unwaxed linen thread and wax it themselves using shoemaker's wax, and some people are even experimenting with original hemp thread and coating it with beeswax. Shoemaker's wax is still available through many companies, for example "Thermo Wax", which is British-made by F. Ball & Co., Ltd.

Currently, I'm experimenting with my blowpipe as I tend to go through quite a bit of black hemp on it. About three weeks ago, I replaced my rotten black hemp with waxed polyester upholstery button thread. It's thicker still than black waxed, so you have to get the wrapping just right. I'll keep you all posted as to how well it stands up!

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