"24-hour Pipe Band" competition! - St. Andrews 2021 скачать в хорошем качестве

"24-hour Pipe Band" competition! - St. Andrews 2021

On Saturday, August 7, I competed at my second-ever (since Covid bands were lifted) bagpiping competition at the St. Andrews Society of Detroit's Highland Festival in Lavonia, Michigan. This was both a solo and band competition for me. My (former) bagpipe teacher, Andrew "Drew" Duncan, organized what can best be described as the equivalent of "24-hour theater" but just with a pipe band. He gave us a recording of the music (in my case) to prepare and asked all the pipers and drummers that he could find if they want to join him for a grade 4 pipe band contest at St. Andrews this year. He and a whole bunch of pipers, including Joey Horwath (who actually played the bass drum believe it or not, being that Joey is otherwise a professional-level piper!), and Pipe major Fred Merrett of the Grand Rapids Pipe Band, and my friend Ben Elliot "Belliot", and Tyge Cawthon, myself, etc, got together with a few drummers and we went on to compete. The tunes here are: 3/4 march: "Jim Thompson of Flagstaff" 3/4 march: "The Siege of Dubrovnik" (had to get the spelling of that one) Slow air / waltz: Morag of Dunvegan" Strathspey: "Braes of Mar" Reel: "Highroad to Linton". Since it was so hot outside we decided to "drum in" (marching to just the tap of a snare drum) rather than play as we marched "on stage" as it were. We marched "off stage" playing Jim Thompson again. Those of you with perfect pitch, especially Hailey, may notice that there's one drone that was so off key with the rest of us, I could actually hear it myself while we were playing in the circle. But you do really have to listen hard for it. It takes one off-key drone to completely ruin the performance! This may be why we got second place, but still for a "24-hour pipe band" placing second, this is still pretty good in my book. We competed as a band in grade 4. For the nonpipers listening to this, there are at least 5 different grades in piping. Grade 5 is where you start, and then it goes progressively down from there to grade 1, which is the highest grade. After grade 1 is professional. I recorded the entire event using my awesome Sound Professionals in-ear microphones to give an accurate "audioselfie". I'm using my amazing replica 1924 Henderson pipes, Canning tenor drone reeds, a Kinnaird Evolution bass reed, Drone Dry stocks, a borrowed G1 (John Elliot I think) chanter that Drew let me use (I swapped my solo chanter's reed to play it in this band chanter and put tape over the band chanter to tune it to the rest of us), a Bannatyne Hybrid medium bag, and a Moose valve in the blowpipe. Over my shoulder, the drones are absolutely tenor-dominant which I don't like at all (it makes it almost impossible to tune the bass drone), but this is the quietest set of tenor drone reeds I could find, and the best-sounding bass reed for this particular set. Even then I am using "drone valves" in the tenors which restrict the airflow making the tenors slightly quieter and steadier as an added benefit. I will include both the ambiences before, and the actual events themselves so it will seem as realistic as possible.