Nigel Bridges ‘road-tests' a recently issued audio piping tutor

Tutor for the Scottish Small Pipes by Vicki Swan

THIS SMALL pipe tutor was Vicki Swan's dissertation submission for an MA (Ed). As she uses that accreditation after Vicki Swan in performance her name on the CD, I would infer that congratulations are in order. Now that she has bravely sent her tutor for review, which does not mean an automatic right to an endorsement, does it cut the mustard?

It comes in the form of a single CD, on which are 6 hours 2 minutes and 12 seconds of audio files (MP3)

and 33 movie files (Quicktime). You can also print off a 44-page tutor which is in the form of a PDF file. It is pretty much essential to print off the tutor so that you can study it as you go through the lessons - but you could have it on screen.

The teaching is split into nine lessons that seem to start with the assumption that the learner has never played small pipes and cannot read music. I say “seem to start with the assumption” because it is not until the end of lesson nine that Vicki states the main aim of the tutor is to give the learner the tools to read music and access tunes from a written manuscript. The end of a tutor is a pretty strange place to find the aim, particularly when it comes almost in passing before the final three tunes in lesson nine. Being an ex-military man I am particularly fond of clearly expressed aims as a prerequisite for starting anything. Remember that aim because I will return to discuss it.

Vicki is a classically trained professional musician and tries to teach in a methodical and structured way. Clearly a lot of effort has gone into this. Throughout evaluating the tutor 1 tried to imagine myself in the shoes of a complete beginner.

Lesson one is spent with bags, drones and getting started. In all of the following lessons you can play along to exercises as you listen but make sure you have a practice chanter in the key of A (i.e. a long one) - mine is Bb so I had to follow using silent fingering.

Lesson two concentrates on the bottom four notes G, A, B and C, which surprised me.

She mentions crossover noises being a problem in piping, but isolating the bottom hand will hardly overcome this. The beginning of rhythm is also covered in lesson two with a system of counting that I think works well as long as the learner does not confuse this with note value.

There is a pretty fundamental error in lesson two. Exercise 212 (which has two lines) gets Vicki out of sync with her written tutor. For the remainder of the lesson Vicki is playing an exercise in front of that stated. So 11 reasons for the pupil to be confused and we are only on lesson two.

This is pretty basic and obviously something her dissertation tutor did not pick up (did they listen to it) and slapdash on the proofing front.

Lesson three is devoted to notes D to high A and does include crossing from the bottom hand to the top hand. Lesson two and three are far too long, tedious and should be streamlined into one.

By the time I had got to lesson three, I knew with a sinking heart that this tutor is no different from the template of most piping tutors. They start with strings of exercises but no music.

Piping suffers from “neurosis of technique”, which paralyses players for the rest of their lives. This is because they have spent hours and hours on technical exercises and thereafter can never play music properly because they are continually worried about getting grace note combinations in the right place. The most absorbing way to learn traditional music is to get stuck into a tune straight away - there are plenty of tunes available for this.

Diving straight in to playing music is great fun and what music is all about. Complete beginners can play simple tunes straight away. This develops the ear. This is far more important than technique, which can follow in its own good time. Reading music is relatively unimportant.

Also by lesson three I was getting annoyed with the irritating introductory, and unfortunately quite long, jingle of Vicki playing. The jingle is at the end of each lesson as well, so thank God for fast forward.

Lesson four is concerned with rhythm. Vicki is good on teaching rhythm and develops this in continuing lessons. You get your first tune at the end of lesson four. The disappointment is that the tune is one written by Vicki. A massive criticism of this tutor is that of 53 tunes in the tutor, 28 are by Vicki or Johnny Dyer. Only 25 (less than half) are traditional. I would have I bought that most people wishing to learn small pipes will want to learn largely traditional tunes, rather than so many of Vicki's own compositions. This might sound harsh criticism as it may be argued some of these tunes are well crafted teaching vehicles. I just see it as self-promotion and unfortunately the tunes tend not to be not of the calibre to supplant those that have stood the test of time. I might forgive a couple of self- compositions.

Lesson four also contains a tune The Damson Tree (exercise 417) that is written with no repeats yet Vicki plays repeats having told her listening pupil that there are none. Not such a crime but it is indicative of a lack of crafting in this product.

Lesson five gets on to the thorny issue of grace notes and has exercises dealing with G, D and E in turn. This lesson is logical about when and where to use grace notes but is incredibly laboured. I cannot help mentioning that throughout the tutor we get glimpses from Vicki, in often embarrassed throw away remarks of her musical knowledge. This happens for example in the introduction of a tune called The Fancy Fool (exercise 507) - another of Vicki's compositions. There is brief delving into musical theory, minor keys and the construction of the tune, and this stuff is interesting.

Lesson six deals with strikes. Lesson seven introduces new time signatures, concentrating on 6/8. In this lesson Vicki states that the time signature for reel time is usually 4/4. LBPS publications tend to favour the same idea but my experience has been of reels in 2/2 time. I think there is a big difference. Reels played 4/4 sound different than when played 2/2. One has four beats in the bar and the other has two beats (strong, weak) which gives much better rhythmic momentum. In Lesson seven the tune Tail Toddle (exercise 713) is written and played 4/4 and sounds completely wooden.

Many of the exercises in the latter lessons of the tutor are tunes. The playing is usually pretty mechanical and whilst it is mathematically correct “it ain't music”. Presumably this is done to illustrate strict note values. Vicki refers to the similarities between maths and music, but what she should say is notation and maths are similar. A piece of written music is just a guide and often a very crude guide at that. There seems very little attempt in this tutor to teach music rather than mathematically expressed notation.

Lesson eight continues to develop rhythm with the introduction of semi-quavers. A couple of the exercises are good for playing rounder and un-graced tunes in the Northumberland idiom of Dixon.

I made a note when listening to this lesson that: “I just feel I am not engaging with the traditional music I know”.

Going back to my comments on Vicki's obvious musical knowledge this occurs again In the introduction to a tune called In the Kitchen (exercise 815) a composition by Johnny Dyer. The technique of giving a staccato effect by having chanter notes disappearing into the drone sound is explained. This again is interesting.

Lesson eight is a monster and split into two parts.

Amongst tunes played in the second half Money Musk (sic) is illustrated (exercise 827) and absolutely murdered in the process. Lesson nine deals with doublings which I felt were not well explained and even sounded weak. Vicki crowns her final lesson with nine tunes, every single one being her own or Johnny's compositions. The final tune is aptly called The Last Leg.

In conclusion I would return to the “aim” of this tutor. The true aim of this tutor was to gain an MA (Ed) and that has been successful. However, the quality of production is amateur, e.g. the sound on the Quicktime clips is not in sync with the movies so that much of the teaching value is rendered useless, and it certainly will not develop a good ear.

Selling this is a bit like someone taking a Scottish higher in mathematics and then publishing their notes as a textbook. Vicki actually apologises at the end of the tutor for it being “rough and ready” - enough said - and I am sorry that this review sounds like the critique her tutor should have given.

Tutor for the Scottish Small Pipes costs £20 + p&p (not specified). You can buy the tutor book separately as a pdf (no audio or video) for £10. Cheques made payable to Vicki Swan at 6 The Street, Cressing Braintree, Essex, CM77 8DG. Details can also be found at http://www.smallpiper.co.uk