The first tune

Last time, I discussed grace notes. It occurs to me that I've been remiss in the area of printed music. If you already read music, this hasn't been a problem, but if you're new to music, a few words are in order.

The best way to learn to know, rock-solid, the fingering for the various notes, then practice scales with the music in front of you. Avoid the habit of watching your fingers. A few weeks and you won't have to think "to play low A, I put all fingers down except the right little finger" or "F-A-C-E, ah, the second space from the top is low A". It will become second nature, as it needs to. That said, pictured below is the musical notation for the first grace note we've discussed, plus two more, the D & E grace notes.

The D & E grace notes are played just like the G grace note, except that you make a short-sounding D & E note, respectively. Do this by briefly covering the D & E chanter holes with the D & E fingers (somewhat confusingly, the fingers are named after the holes they cover and not by the note they would produce if covering the respective hole. I.E., if the E finger is covering its hole, a D comes out.)

Now for the first of the "real" grace notes you'll learn, the D-throw (although Seumas MacNeill calls it Double D). There are actually three ways of playing this note sequence: the heavy, the light, and a third way that I regard as substandard. No matter how it's played, it's represented musically by the figure on the right.

Play the heavy D-throw (left), by sounding low G, D, low G, C, and then D.

Likewise, the light D-throw (above right), is played by sounding low G, then D to C, and then D.

If you don't care about "correct fingering", you can play a in a quick and dirty way. Being somewhat of a purist, I don't care for this method. The way you do this is: sound low G to D, then strike the D hole with the D finger. There's no sense in learning this way when it is just as easy to learn the correct styles.

Which style to play is the subject of a religious war similar to which editor, vi or emacs, is the One True Editor, or Linux vs FreeBSD, or UNIX vs Windows 9x. Our band used to favor the light throw; our new pipe major believes there's only one throw, the heavy. I actually find the heavy easier to play, but that's me.

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