I have been contacted by the copyright holders for some of the tunes in the music archive and asked to remove a number of tunes. While I may have opinions about that, legally I am compelled to do as they wish. Hence, the archive is a little smaller now.

Canntaireachd is a method of orally describing the various movements in piobaireachd music. It probably dates back to before 1500 A.D., and has existed in many different “dialects”. The predominant dialect of today is the Nether Lorn canntaireachd, as used in the Piobaireachd Society books. This is what will be described below, taken more or less verbatim from their preface.

The example of canntaireachd below also contains a sample of the MacCrimmon canntaireachd. More about this will be added to these pages at some point.

I have now rebuilt all the pipe music in the archive. There are two reasons for this: To have all the music built with the same version of Lilypond, and to recreate all the thumbnail images to give them a somewhat bigger size better suited to the new web layout.

You can see the result of all this in the sheet music archive. Enjoy!

There! The bagpipe sheet music archive has been brought back to life. It was actually easier than I thought to port it to a Drupal module. I might do a write-up on how it works later. But for now, go here for all your music pleasures.

Recently the Swedish television company www.svt.se have started to add a lot of old film and video clips to their web site in the Open Archive. One of the featured programs at the moment is HAJK, a childrens program that aired during the whole 1980:s. The host, Bengt Alsterlind became something of a cult figure, a person we all loved to hate. Watch the clip, and you'll see why.

So, with out further ado here's how to build your own bagpipes out of a plastic bag, a coat hanger, a fipple flute, and some gaffa tape. Enjoy!

Bengt bygger en säckpipa

I'm back from a trip to Oban and Glasgow together with Mats, Marie, and Anders Prytz. We had a great time listening, among other things, to the senior piobaireachd and big MSR. Winners of these events were Angus MacColl and Gordon Walker (third year running) respectively. More results from Oban here.

Images in the gallery.

Weee! My goal of 100 tunes in the sheet music archive has been achieved! And these are good tunes too, mind you. Now, I will take a break from this and leave the adding to the other band members (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean?)

OK, the sheet music archive is coming along nicely. Today I took a big proofreading pass of all the tunes. Now the settings should be (mostly) correct. I have also included information on how to get started writing bagpipe music with Lilypond on the sheet music page.

I haven't grown tired of this yet, so expect more tunes to be added. I intend to have 100 tunes added within 2 weeks.

Svenax and Mats, P/M of the Murray Pipes & Drums of Gothenburg, have for many years had a project going to get all of our excellent music settings into the computer and have them available as downloadable files. We used to do this using BagpipeTeX, a set of macros and definitions on top of MusicTeX.

Recently, however, I have for many reasons started to convert the music to Lilypond instead. It produces better ouput, is better maintained, and is much easer to use. As a consequence, I have made the tunes available from my Sheet Music archive. Feel free to take a look.

As I am on vacation for a few weeks and finally have some time to devot to this, I intend to update the tunes fairly often. Expect at least a few new tunes to appear every day in the near future.

So, I'm back from the Scandinavian Pipe Band Championships 2005, in Herning, Denmark. I only competed with the band, no solos for me this time - but I will take part in piobaireachd at least, I promise.

Anyhow, the event went fine, the weather held up - even though it was unusually early in the year - and everybody had a good time.

Some pictures from the event and the final day party can be found in my photo gallery. Two really good video clips from TV2 Midtvest are here and here.