McGillivray’s Piobaireachd Fingerwork now available

Jim McGillivray has announced that his new technical tutor, Piobaireachd Fingerwork, has arrived from the printer and is now ready to ship. The 140-plus page book is a comprehensive guide to all piobaireachd technique, including how to play common technical variations.

Piobaireachd Fingerwork takes the same approach as McGillivray’s Rhythmic Fingerwork, its 1998 predecessor, breaking the difficult technique of piobaireachd into small aspects that are designed to be understandable, and then brought together into complete movements. There are 118 exercises and five complete piobaireachds in the tutor.

Piobaireachd Fingerwork deals not only with piobaireachd movements, it also describes the most common piobaireachd variations (dithis, siubhal, etc) and how they have been traditionally played.

“It’s been a long road, nearly eight years,” said McGillivray. “I had more than half of it written seven years ago, and then the idea for pipetunes.ca and the vintage bagpipe side of the business came into my head and I got sidetracked for five years! I confess it wasn’t easy to delve back into it. Life seems busier now than it was then.”

A chapter is devoted to reading piobaireachd scores as printed in the Piobaireachd Society and Kilberry collections. Another details the intricacies of canntaireachd, the pipers’ musical language.

“Like Rhythmic Fingerwork, a big focus of the book is on helping experienced players improve their technique and practice it so that the movements become more automatic.”

All exercises and tunes are demonstrated by McGillivray on mp3 files that purchasers of the book can download in chapters from one of the author’s websites.