Tickets bought, passport en route, B&B's being investigated. I'm looking forward to this trip!

My recent increase in interest in dance has made look at Highland Dance tunes & sets on pipes last night for the first time in ages. I really ought to focus on building a repertoire for that for a while. I've also spent some time on flute, trying to improve my embouchure, with a little help from my friend Rosemary Gano.

One of the things I need to start doing, maybe on lazy weekend mornings, is to begin trying my hand at composing tunes. I have, alas, but one to my name, Carolyn Lentz's reel. I'd like to finally get an air ("Lament for the Death of John Schroeter"), a march ("The GSA Men's Team at Beer-Bike"), and a strathspey ("Rich Darzawhatsit's") to have a complete Valhalla set.

I figure the more I write, the easier it'll be. And I'll have some of my own tunes to mix into the Devil's Tailors' repertoire!

Fiddle Club is taking a week-long trip to Cape Breton this summer. I'm somewhat excited, though I have no idea what to expect. I'm even thinking of not bringing instruments, to be there just to listen and learn.

I'll probably book the flight this weekend, after I get my passport renewal process underway.

Well, rather than try to summarize my musical career since my last major post, I'll just summarize the last month and pick up from there.

And it's been a busy month. on March 20, I hosted the March Fiddle Club meeting at my house, which featured some great tunes from a little-known composer (and from his publisher too), a fun jam, and my venison stew. The very next week was the annual Fiddle Club dance, which had good turnout from musicians and dancers, though not quite at last year's levels; and once again I got to lead the band, this time for the final three sets, and we were featured in a local newspaper!

Then April 2 rolled around, and we had the National Tartan Day festival in Old Town Alexandria. This promised to be a great event, with lots of vendors and public, though it was light on the musical acts because of conflicts - we had no Highland Dancers and only four Scottish Country Dancers, and only one Celtic band, my very own Devil's Tailors; and the City of Alexandria Pipes and Drums came out to give us some great tunes too. Alas, the weather was also very Scottish, and the festival was hammered by several rainstorms between bouts of lovely weather. Still it was a lot of fun, and we repaired to Pat Troy's for drinks afterward.

The next Sunday was another Fiddle Club meeting in DC, scheduled a week early. This time we talked about Fairy and Trowie tunes, and a slow jam (which the regular jammers eventually joined).

On Wednesday, April 6, I attended the National Tartan Day reception at the Capitol Visitors Center, playing for the St. Andrew's Society, National Tartan Day Committee, and several members of the British Embassy and the US Congress; with Minority Leader Pelosi and Speaker Boehner dropping by to say a few words.

Last weekend, I spent Saturday afternoon at the Carlyle House; they were reenacting the 1755 meeting of the colonial governors with General Braddock to begin the Seven Years/French and Indian War, and I turned out as an 18th century piper to play a few period tunes to lure people to the event. And Sunday was our Royal Mile jam - a light turnout, but great fun nonetheless.

Last night, I returned to the Durant Center to play for the dance after the Annual General Meeting of the NoVA RSCDS. The dancers were more experienced than usual, so there was less instruction and more dancing - they made us earn our pay! But it was great fun.

Some things coming down the pipeline include a website update/redesign. I'll be cleaning up the pages, updating where I need to, adding info, and changing the background tiles to make things more legible. I'll also try to create more event galleries, as I've piled a few up over the years.

In the slightly more distant future, I'll have some fun new instruments featured - I'm on the cusp of ordering a gaita grillera (a Spanish bagpipe in D), an instrument very similar to the great pipe from the Scottish lowlands, which went extinct around 1700. It'll be great for songs in D and G, especially Maggie Lauder (and is likely the kind of pipe the narrator of the song played). EJ Jones is going to create a new bag and stocks so I can plug it into a bellows, which is how it was played in the latter days of the 17th century before giving way to the smallpipe and border pipe.

My repertoire page will likely change a lot too, to reflect some of my favorite pipe and fiddle tunes, and songs, especially those not played by the Devil's Tailors!

Also, hopefully I'll be getting some more gear for reenacting, like a shirt, coat, and waistcoat, and I'll document making those. I might also start working on a suit of woman's clothing for my girlfriend, whom I'm trying to recruit into the Appins.

It's been a year since my last post, and honestly, it's been a lot of business as usual in that time. Gigs, tunes, practice, that sort of thing.

The one new thing to report is that I've been intermittently taking Scottish Country Dance lessons since the fall 2010, and have picked up a great instructional DVD of Scottish Step Dance, and have so far learned (sort of) one whole step!

We're coming out of winter, the Tailors are beginning to gig again, so hopefully there'll be more soon, not to mention a major site update.

EJ Jones built a set of border pipes for me, based on an 18th century example from the Mopreth chantry museum. The originals were made of sycamore, brass, and ivory, so that's what he made these from.



I had him make me a spare tenor-A drone, so I could set up with 2 tenors and one bass (like the pipes in the photo), or tenor, baritone, and bass (like the usual border pipes); but only had 3 holes drilled in the main stock. They are illustrated above in the latter configuration.

These pipes are gorgeous, and they sound great. I debuted them at The Royal Mile jam session last night, and they were a lot of fun to play. I will probably use these for reenacting, for tunes where I need to sing while playing (hard to do w/ the Highland pipes), and for jam sessions.

They're not quite done. EJ is going to produce a more decorative main stock for me, and I will likely spend the extra bucks to get ivory put on it, and on the chanter stock, like the originals. He's also finishing up the bellows (I played with my smallpipe bellows last night).

More pictures once Jay Ford gets the chance to point his camera at them.

With the purchase of my pewter-and-horn mounted kingwood pipes, very similar to the Waterloo set from c. 1715, from Al Saguto in October 2006, my period piper kit got a lot more accurate, and I got a great set of drones. But they were chanterless! I had a Hamish Moore 440 chanter, based on a late 18th century source, which I quite liked, and played with them for a while, but the wood was wrong - it was African blackwood, which would not have been available to an 18th century piper. I needed something in a brown wood that would either be native to the British Isles, or would have been available through the existing trade routes. In discussions with Collier Hyams, I learned that kingwood was known to instrument makers in the 18th century (though there was no indication it was used for pipes), and kingwood would at least pass for something more appropriate, and was already the wood the drones were in.

So I decided to commission a 440 chanter in kingwood for these pipes back in spring 2008, based on the one William Cumming was painted as playing in his 1714 portrait by Richard Waitt.



The consensus among scholars on the chanter in the portrait was that it is totally fanciful; the chanter appears to have a bell on it, which is inconsistent with any known Highland chanter of the period, and it doesn't narrow toward the high end, before expanding again into the bulb.

But I took a closer look. The latter criticism is legitimate, but perhaps can be chalked up to artistic license. But the former doesn't seem to hold up: the "bell" joins the chanter not at the top of the flare, but two thirds down its length. And I concluded that the "bell" was actually a pewter sole turned in the shape of a bell, not a bell at all.

So I asked EJ Jones, the piper who inspired me to take up the instrument in the first place, and who had previously made me a set of smallpipes (his third set ever!), to turn me a chanter out of kingwood to match the wood in my chalice-top pipes I bought from Al Saguto. Here's the concept art I sent him.



The small band between the D- and E-holes was inspired by a different chanter entirely, the one from the "Speckled Pipes of the MacCrimmons", but the bottom band is definitely visible on the Waitt portrait.

EJ suggested we move the larger band below the tone-holes to between the tone holes and the A-hole. Of course, I was asking EJ to learn a whole new skill, the turning of pewter, and there were... complications along the way.

So first EJ turned the chanter blank, which he sent me to play for the June 2008 Celebrate Fairfax and several other gigs.



During this time, EJ got to learning about pewter. His first attempt at turning leaded pewter was a disaster, with lead dust everywhere, and I ran back to the previous owner of the drones, who was the one who removed the nickel silver and had the pewter mounts added. He confirmed for me that he used a lead-free pewter, which was consistent with what EJ was learning in his own research. Eventually, and with great effort, he figured out how to cast and turn the pewter. He gave me a call, and I returned the chanter to have it mounted.

EJ put on the bulb and sole, but not yet the band, and got me the chanter just after St. Pat's, 2009; and I have been loath to part with it since. Here's the beauty herself:



When he gave it to me, EJ indicated he had (in the year since he turned the body of the chanter) changed his design for 440 chanters, and suggested starting over on the wood before adding the third band. It being a still perfectly good chanter, I offered to work out a deal where I would buy two chanters; one mounted with a pewter sole, bulb, and band, and the old chanter mounted on sole and bulb in a material TBD. Bone was discussed for a while, but in the end, he just copied the pewter from the old chanter for the new.

Here, I'll leave the telling of the tale to EJ. Here's his first entry on the making of the chanter, and here's his second.

So by early March, I should have both chanters, and another surprise. More later.

Update: There has been a bit of a snag.



Okay, so April it is!

Until then, I will content myself with this amateurishly done computer simulated composite image of what I think the final product might look like...

So things are taking off with the Devil's Tailors, and my solo site has languished. I've had many gigs, a bunch of new instruments, and a lot of new experiences.

But until I have time to get truly caught up, here are three performances from me at a Burns Supper on 1/23/10: