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Here on the Studio, we've focused on many important elements of technique: grace notes, doublings, and GDEs. In combination with your efforts to improve expression of the dot-cut, to keep your fingers closer to the chanter, and to keep your hands relaxed, these exercises can help you make great progress towards clean, clear, effortless technique. Today we advance another step further: advanced GDE triplets as seen in strathspeys. Strathspeys are dance tunes written in the 4/4 time signature. The dominant stylistic theme of the strathspey is the dot-cut. The rhythms used for a single beat in strathspeys are: the quarter note (long) the dot-cut (long-short) the cut-dot (short-long) the triplet (short-short-long) You will never see two even eighth notes in a strathspey. Often in strathspeys you will see a cut-dot combination with a doubling on the cut note: However, despite the way it is written, this rhythm is correctly played like a triplet (short-short-long): So, ...