![]() ![]() I would say that the best place to be is blowing up to 110% and squeezing down to 105%. If you blow over 100%, you now develop “psi”. Most people believe that you blow the bag up to 100% and squeeze down to 75%. At this point, the bag is above capacity to where you are now working in “psi” or “pounds per square inch”. At that point, the bag should feel like a volley ball. In order to blow a steady tone, your bag should be full right before the point that your drones go out. If you can then try blowing out 2 drones. If you cannot do this, you should put in 2 drone corks and see if you can blow out 1 drone. Test your strength: Put a rubber stopper in your chanter stock and blow up your pipes with all three drones open and see if you can make all of them stop by blowing hard. On the bagpipes, I would say that your ultimate goal is to be able to blow out all three of your drones. The exception might be athletes, wind and brass musicians, and singers. People neither inhale completely nor exhale completely in the course of a day. The average person walking the face of the earth has this much breath /-/ however on a daily basis they only use this much: /-–/. In order to develop the breath to its ultimate strength, we have to set a goal and break it down. Let’s face it, if we look like we are struggling when we play the pipes, no one would ever want to do it. The goal to ultimate “blowing and squeezing” is to make it look easy to our audience. The goal is to start at the extremes of the pendulum and work toward the middle. ![]() On one side of the pendulum is the breath and on the other side is the arm. Developing the breath and the arm are like a pendulum. (That is the downside of electronic chanters.) The lip improves in the process of playing the practice chanter. The lip begins developing the minute a new bagpiper blows on the practice chanter. There are three facets to blowing the pipes: the breath, the lip and the arm. The problem is that it takes a lot of strength to be able to blow steady. The bag acts as a reservoir for the air so that when we do breathe, nothing happens to the sound. The job of the breath on our instrument is to keep the bag full. The Great Highland Bagpipe of Scotland is one of the few wind instruments in the world where “the breath” has nothing to do with the musical line. I seem to be working with a lot of people right now on “blowing and squeezing”.
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