I've been playing a lot of dance music recently. I played for a dance class with Liz Donaldson before heading to Houston for St. Patrick's, and yesterday, I played for a fiddle club dance. A few weeks back, I played with CAPD for the Thistle Dancers. I'm enjoying the challenge - it's difficult, especially on these long sets, to be so consistent with tempo and rhythm, but it's a good exercise. Especially at the higher tempos. I've promised myself that I'm going to do more playing for dancers, whenever I can.

The metronome that was supposed to help me through this died mysteriously when I dropped it. The sad part is that I dropped it on carpet! The display comes on, but there's no sound. And it doesn't look like something so simple as a broken wire. So I've been practicing with a mechanical metronome, only to discover that it gives one of my cats metronomic seizures. I'm not joking here!

The hardest sets to get up to tempo were some pipe 6/8 marches I wanted to play for the dance yesterday for a jig set. The set included All the Blue Bonnets are Over the Border, The Atholl Highlanders, and John D. Burgess. And I found the easiest parts to get to tempo were the parts I didn't already know from CAPD - mainly because it's very hard to play 6/8 march ornaments at jig dance tempo. But I pulled it off well, and I and the shuttle piper made a nice addition to the group's sound.

I started my concert series at Potomac Overlook Park this week. It was more of a dress rehearsal, in some ways. The weekend staff were still figuring things out, I didn't have any publicity ready yet (other than an 8.5"x11" version of my business card) and the weather was cold and threatened rain the whole time (though we only got a few drops). I played with Julie Gorka, but Rosemary came out to listen. I tried to get her to play whistle, but she just wouldn't do it! The concert's best moment came when I played my Highland pipes in 440Hz with Julie on piano. The pipes were a bit flatter than that, actually, but that set sounded really great, tuning aside. I did get some enthusiastic mothers and kids to listen for a while, and may have a gig in June out of it. Next concert will probably be April 8th, and I'll probably have Chris with me for it.

The band rehearsals are proceeding apace. Chris had the great idea to combine our waltz set (which begins with Banks o' Doon) with "Ye Banks and Braes" by Burns (which uses that tune). We're also giving Rosemary more flute and less piano on these remaining sets. We talked about some standards we want to have in our pocket too, but I don't want to stress these too much. They'll be things we have available for requests, not part of the formal repertoire.

The PA gear is all in place, cases and all; now it's down to instrument parts and DIs and the like. And I should probably stencil my name on all the gear. I'm also putting the finishing touches on the studio workstation. Mainly I just need cables to connect the mixer to the firewire audio sampling box, to strain-relief some computer cables, and to install and learn ProTools 7 M-Powered.

I'm finally back to learning solo repertoire for pipes again, mainly reels, and dance tunes from the Patrick McDonald collection for reenacting. We're going through the Skye and Simon Fraser collections on fiddle; at home, I also will start looking at Liz Donaldson's dance tune books, as well as continuing to look at the Gow and Marshall collections, along my the Irish repertoire.