Drumming and Piping Links

Hello Everyone!  With the marching season soon to be upon us (an onslaught is a more apt description!) I thought that a few links to some piping and drumming sites might be the thing to get us pumped up and ready!  These are sites that I visit every so often, as well as a few others that some may find interesting.

http://pipehacker.com/  A cool blog/learning site, "Better Living Through Bagpipes" is their tag.  It has tips and suggestions for the piper, as well as an index of "Small Tunes" these are short, usually two parted tunes that are quick and lively.  The author of the blog gives a brief history of the tune and then plays it, as well as provides a copy of the music.  I picked up one short reel, "The Death of the Wren" their and had it down in an hour.  Shows how simple they can be.

http://come2drum.wordpress.com/ Seems like a great blog for the drummers in our band!  The most recent post has to do with being unique as a drummer and the difficulties it is to find different music.  At the bottom of that post there is a link to even MORE drumming links with music, though it's available for purchase.

http://www.ceolsean.net/ and http://pipetunes.ca/ these two sites are great when used together, or even seperately.  The Ceolsean site bills itself as, "The World's Largest On-line Collection of Bagpipe Music" and this may be true!  Over 7,000 FREE bagpipe tunes available.  Many are from long ago forgotten authors, or traditional.  There are tunes you probably never heard of here.  Pipetunes.ca is great as it allows one to download sheet music for a fee, however.  But, they do provide an mp3 of each tune for free.  A great resource if you'd like to hear a specific tune that you found on ceolsean.net.

http://blogpipe-pipesdrums.com/  This site seems good for both drummers and pipers.  Lots of good posts about issues specific to drummers, as well as pipers.  I particularly liked this line the author posted, "For those who don’t take tenor-drumming seriously – try it. Get yourself a set of tenor mallets and learn just a bit of flourishing technique. You’ll have a more positive outlook on the difficulty of the art."

And don't forget youtube!  A quick search will bring up hundreds and thousands of drumming and piping links, tutorials, concerts, and the average joes and janes just posting what they will! 

Anyways, those are just a few sites that we could take a look at and enjoy while we wait for the barbarian invasion that is March and the Holy of Holiest Days, St. Patrick's Day!  If anybody can suggest some other sites please post them in the comment box, it'd be great to have a list of resources that we can all reference. 

And a little inspiration we all can enjoy!