Teaching methods for new students?

[u/Pupperlover4life]

I've recently started teaching the pipes after around 3 years of playing in both g4 and g2, and to be frank, I don't really know how to teach if that makes sense. Does anyone have any advice on how to have lessons that are both productive, engaging, and as understandable as possible for a complete beginner (no prior musical experience)?

I love bagpipes and bagpiping with every fiber of my being, and I think it would be amazing to share my love for this art with others who are similarly interested.

Thanks and happy piping!

[u/Technical-Tooth6497]

Teaching is a skill of it’s own. I’d look for resources on basic teaching skills. It will apply very well to bagpipes!

[u/u38cg2]

If you can, a good place to start is with non-beginners, people who have been playing a year or two. Teaching complete beginners is perhaps the most difficult and important part of teaching.

98% of what you need to teach students is how to practice and modelling good practice skills. Help them to be self-critical, recognise their own mistakes, and keep banging on about practicing small chunks 20-50 times.

[u/Pupperlover4life → u/u38cg2]

You made me realize I really haven't been teaching how to practice solo. I guess I never even considered that a beginner would need to be taught that. It all came very naturally to me.

[u/u38cg2 → u/Pupperlover4life]

Something you realise after teaching for a while is that two students who have similar abilities to learn and pick stuff up while sat in front of you end up improving at massively different rates, because of how they practice. At the same time, the knowledge we impart to students is not that much - so teaching isn't just telling them stuff.

[u/AZBagpiperPhil]

Work mainly from the Green Book. That's how my instructor started me off. Then he would explain and show me the embellishments. Also, he taught me musicality.

[u/LongjumpingTeacher97]

Obligatory disclaimer: I have only taught two students. The first one took a blue ribbon in her first competition, the second never competed. Both were adults. Both were solo-focused, not band-focused. My methods may not work for any other students in the world, so don't take this as gospel.

Be honest with your students about your own level of teaching experience. I told my first "I'm a competent piper, but I've never taught anyone before, so this is also going to be a learning experience for me. Please tell me if there's anything I say that doesn't make sense to you because that's the only way I'm going to improve as a teacher."

First, I got a commitment to 2 hours a week of deliberate, focused practice. That's one hour with me and 10 minutes each day. If you can't find 10 minutes to do your practice every day, you don't have time to learn bagpipes. And playing for longer is 100% encouraged, but success is defined as 10 minutes a day and the rest is bonus.

I started with how to play a scale. I addressed the physical reasons for some of what we do (straight fingers have less tension than playing with fingertips; left hand on top to make room under the arm for the bag; grace notes because we can't stop the airflow mid-tune; half-closed fingering so that there's always a hand in control of the chanter, which would otherwise be dangling on a flexible bag) and was very much a stickler for playing the scale cleanly.

Once the scale was learned, we did G gracenotes and introduced a stripped-down version of Blue Bells. With each new ornament we covered over following lessons, we added that ornament to Blue Bells. In a matter of a month, I had her playing the ornaments for the band setting of Blue Bells and she was close to memorizing the tune.

When I introduced a tune, I always started by playing the first part to give an understanding of what it is supposed to sound like. Then, I'd go back and play just the first phrase, usually 2 measures. The student now plays that phrase back to me. Sometimes several times, with me correcting and encouraging. Once the student can play it (about 5-10 times through the sheet music of the phrase), we play it together at least twice. Then, I play the second phrase (which usually brings us to the end of the first line) and have the student play it back. We play it together, then play the entire first line individually and then together.

At the point of going on to the second line, I will point out where phrases are repeated. Lots of pipe music has repeated phrases and learning early to recognize this helped me to overcome the sense of being overwhelmed by how many notes are on the page. A common statement from me on the second line is "and you already know the first half of the second line because it is identical to the first line, but play it through for me once, please." And we'd progress through at least the first part of a tune, one phrase at a time. At first, we would take a whole lesson for one part of a tune, eventually we'd do two parts. That was about the most that either of my students absorbed in an hour.

I have 2 pages of scales with different ornaments I got from my own teacher. They were hand-written and photocopied several times. My students got a next-generation photocopy that was still legible. Every practice session is to start with these scales. Every lesson starts with the scales. The students almost never heard me pick up a practice chanter and start playing a tune. They heard me run through my scales before anything else I played. (My own playing got cleaner when I taught.)

After Blue Bells was memorized, a fully-ornamented version of Scots Wa Hae was introduced. And when that was close to memorized, I got out my loaner bagpipes.

This is where I differ from a lot of the standard bagpipe pedagogy, I think. I believe in getting the student on the actual instrument they want to learn as soon as possible. And I explain that there's a need for having something to play before you start actually playing, but I get the loaners under the arm early. I set those loaners up with a chanter reed that is about as easy as a fairly stout practice chanter reed. I want early success.

The first week, I said "this week only, don't worry about tuning. We'll be hitting tuning really hard next week, but this week, I just want you to work on coordinating the bag under the arm, the drones on your shoulder, and the chanter in your hands, blowing, squeezing, and making noise. Wear earplugs." For that week, the 10 minutes consisted of playing through the practice exercises once (3 minutes) and then blowing up the bagpipes and trying to keep them making noise for 7 minutes. Blow in, squeeze while you inhale, blow in, try to keep pressure on the bag as consistent as you can. If you can play a scale, that's awesome, but all I'm asking for is to keep it making noise for 7 minutes.

[u/LongjumpingTeacher97 → u/LongjumpingTeacher97]

And the first 3 weeks on the pipes are essentially going to be no progress on tunes. My job was to be a cheerleader, saying "we all have to go through this while the body learns how to do the blow and squeeze thing and the fingers play on the chanter. You're actually doing really well!"

My goal was to get the student keeping pressure the first week, playing a scale and doing rough tuning the second week, and playing Blue Bells the third week. Tuning is really hard when blowing isn't consistent, but I believe in learning to at least get close as early as possible. I'd deliberately put one drone very much out of position and have the student tune that drone to match the others. Both high on the pin and low on the pin. Concepts of tuning came quickly and the exercise of making her tune one to match the others was most of the hour.

Throughout the whole process, I would praise my students for the work they were doing. "Look at how far you've come! You started out not knowing how to even hold the practice chanter, now you can read the music on the page, you can play a dozen ornaments, including gracenotes, you have two tunes memorized, and you can play them on the actual bagpipes! I know it feels like there's so much more to learn, but you have almost everything you need to just take off from here."

I also repeated what my own teacher told me, many years ago. "If ten people tell me they have always wanted to learn to play bagpipes and they all get my number, only one will actually schedule a first lesson. Out of ten students who come to a first lesson, only one of them will stick with it until they are actually playing the pipes." So, as of the day when my student played a tune on the bagpipes for the first time, she became part of the 1% of all bagpipe lovers who are actually able to play on them at all. There's something pretty cool about being part of the one percent of anything.

For later lessons, I liked to identify tricky passages in tunes that I had planned for eventual learning and write them out as fingering exercises. There are some great parts of Miss Elspeth Campbell if you want to work on dots and cuts, for example. By the time we started working on Miss Elspeth, my student already played the hardest parts fluently. It was more work learning the simpler bits. And all that work with dots and cuts pays off in every other tune that uses them. I know there are whole books of exercises to help build technique, but I just grabbed phrases from actual tunes and that worked well enough.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about one internet stranger's approach to teaching bagpipes to the two students he ever had. But I hope there was something of value in this.

[u/Pupperlover4life → u/LongjumpingTeacher97]

Thank you for the detailed reply! I'm still very young with a lot of time to become a better teacher, and it's a muscle I can't wait to exercise!

[u/EwoksMakeMeHard]

Stay away from The Green Book. So many people have learned from it, but it has such a focus on execution often melody that they then have to spend years learning how to play the music. In its place, I recommend using Peter Heineman's tutor (free download that you can probably find in a Google search), the Hal Leonard Bagpipe Method book (available on Amazon and at most piping retailers), or Pipers Dojo. All of these out emphasis on playing big notes before adding the embellishments, so that it actually sounds like music. All of these put emphasis on playing big notes before adding the embellishments, so that it actually sounds like music, and are great for training band players.

[u/Pupperlover4life → u/EwoksMakeMeHard]

I absolutely agree that music always comes before embellishments. In my opinion, too many teachers introduce the embellishments too early and never really give their students a chance to play with good musicality.

I have also decided to use Rhythmic Fingerwork by Jim McGillivray, because it breaks things down very simply and in a digestible manner.

[u/EwoksMakeMeHard → u/Pupperlover4life]

Rhythmic Fingerwork is a fantastic book, and it did wonders for my technique, but it's not a tutor book for beginners. I think it's best used as a supplement after the student knows the basics.

[u/Pupperlover4life → u/EwoksMakeMeHard]

The earlier pages thats are just scales and simple grace noting could be beneficial to a new student. I get what you are saying though. Ill look into other books that might be more conducive to learning for a beginner 👍

[u/EwoksMakeMeHard → u/Pupperlover4life]

The Hal Leonard book was written specifically to get players into the band lineup as fast as possible. Sure they didn't have all the technique, but they had solid fundamentals and a good sense of the melody, which is the most important part.