Christmas tunes on the pipes are adaptations, so treat them with total freedom. Since these aren't official pipe tunes to begin with, there's no single correct version — you can play the simplest possible reading or dress it up with D throws, birls, and embellishments as you like.
There are two distinctly different kinds of dots in pipe music. A dot paired with a cut note behaves very differently from a lone dot with no cut note attached — the second kind is treated literally as 50% extra length, not exaggerated the way a dot-cut is.
Most familiar Christmas melodies use the Mixolydian mode. That's the normal major scale with the seventh note flattened by a half step — the same mode most bagpipe music naturally lives in, which is part of why so many carols translate well to the chanter.
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Christmas Tunes — October 25, 2021
54m · Full class available to Inner Circle members
⏱️ In this class
02:48total interpretive tunes get freedom Christmas Why🔒
05:48carol out scratch a Writing from🔒
10:16Comparing published versions different🔒
14:55tempo performance Finding comfortable a🔒
19:06by out tune's structure a Seeing it writing familiar🔒
32:09dots kinds pipe Two of in music🔒
37:10Treating as 50% dot literally a length lone extra🔒
43:54Browsing tune arrangements a Christmas whole book of🔒
46:18scale outside pipe Substituting notes the🔒
47:57mode naturally so in many Mixolydian carols Why sit🔒
About this class
🔒 The write-up and the quotes from this class are part of the members’ page.
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📜 Full class transcript
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