Doublings, gracenotes, taorluaths, birls, and the daily workouts that build fast, clean, relaxed fingers.
Clean but slow, or fast but falling apart? The limit is tension, not talent. Hand position top and bottom, the thumb between the middle and ring fingers, a 2-out-of-10 squeeze, fingers that hinge at the knuckle, and three ways to build speed: inch the metronome up, Willie McCallum's three speeds, and interval speed training.
Clean at this tempo, or fast and falling apart? What holds most pipers back is not effort or practice time — it is technique. Light hands (a 2 out of 10 squeeze), fingers an inch off the chanter, where each hand goes, tiny gracenotes, and raising the metronome one click at a time.
This is the replay of the Inner Circle Live class I taught on Wednesday, September 2, 2026 — Back to School: Structured Practice for Technique and Timing.
I open with a reframe that drives the whole session: pipers tend to think of doublings as sequences of finger movements, but a doubling is really a…
This session is a full play-along technique workout — the kind of 10-minute daily routine I recommend every piper keep in their back pocket. After…
The top hand is where technique gets hard: it's most pipers' non-dominant hand, it belongs to the bag arm, and it carries the busiest embellishments…
This video grew out of a 47-second short that became the most-viewed, most-liked, and most-commented clip in my channel history — and also the most…
In this Bagpipe Essentials Masterclass lesson, I teach the birl, one of the most important and most frequent movements in pipe tunes. I focus on the "…
In this second lesson from the Bagpipe Essentials Masterclass, I focus on the bottom hand, including a detail that is often overlooked: the position …
In this short lesson from the Bagpipe Essentials Masterclass, I walk through how to find the ideal top hand position on the practice chanter. I start …
I dig into two of piping's more obscure embellishments — the rodin and the darado — movements born in piobaireachd that also spice up jigs and…
I introduce what I call the most important and most unique exercise I've ever created: Power Dot-Cut Fluidity. The dot-cut — a long, dotted note…
In this Power Series lesson, I tackle a note combination that trips up a lot of pipers: the strathspey triplet. I show how these are commonly written …
In this Power Series lesson, I break down the Power Doublings exercise, a fingering drill built around the single most common embellishment in…
In this session, I dig into what finger dexterity actually is — the ability to make small, precise movements quickly, with accuracy and control — and …
I share one of my favorite Power Series exercises, Power GDEs, targeting the GDE — a gracenote combination made up of high G, D, and E — found in…
In this session, I work through James Clear's bestseller Atomic Habits chapter by chapter and translate it directly into bagpipe practice. Starting…
This session is a complete tour of the top hand: the position, the tension habits, and every major embellishment that lives up there. I start with…
What do you do when one corner of a tune refuses to come out? In this session, I build custom practice drills live, working from trouble spots…
In this Inner Circle lesson, I tackle two of the most demanding fingering embellishments in bagpipe music: the crunluath and the…