A slip of the tongue, a Facebook post later and ‘master of nine’ seemed too good a mistake to waste, so here’s what I wrote with appended list of my non-masterly ‘skills’…<\/p>\n
Having described myself yesterday as a ‘jack of all trades and master of [oops!] nine’, I’ve tried to count the instruments I ‘play’… not a clear-cut task when some things maybe count separately (e.g. Boehm flute vs. simple flute or smallpipes vs. border pipes) whereas others clearly don’t (e.g. different sizes\/makes of recorders and whistles), but let’s say ten or eleven to a useful (not master!) standard and a few more I’ve dabbled with, taken lessons in or (trombone alert!) started learning now. No way I’m still as good at anything as the recorder player who spent a year at Koninklijk Conservatorium, Den Haag, nearly thirty years ago, but it’s fun… sometimes frustrating fun when I can’t practise everything all the time, but fun!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nDecent<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
- Recorders (learned at school, then studied with Rosemary McGillivray and Jennifer Hill in Glasgow, Alan Davis in Birmingham and Michael Barker in Den Haag)<\/li>\n
- Flutes (studied Boehm flute with Frances Wilson and Joanne Boddington in Glasgow, self-taught on simple\/trad. flute and dabbling with baroque flute)<\/li>\n
- Whistles (short course with John Gahagan at Battlefield Band’s Highland Circus, Ullapool 1989, otherwise self-taught)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Fair<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n
- Piano (studied with Ian Dobie, Vince Chudy and Robert Foxcroft in Glasgow)<\/li>\n
- Accordion (self-taught)<\/li>\n
- Guitar (self-taught, and better 20 years ago than I am now!)<\/li>\n
- Bass (self-taught, and much the same as guitar!)<\/li>\n
- Scottish smallpipes (started March 2012 and largely self-taught, but have also attended several of Ian Kinnear’s smallpipes weekends)<\/li>\n
- Border pipes (started August 2013 and basically self-taught)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Working knowledge (mostly for school)<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n
- Tuned percussion<\/li>\n
- Drum kit (intro. from Ron Forbes at Northern College teacher training)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Now seriously starting and intent on keeping up<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n
- Trombone<\/li>\n
- [Edit: 30 June 2024] Since April 2023, Ukulele, which has pretty well supplanted Guitar for my ageing hands in the ‘Fair’ category above.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Dabbled<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n
- Violin (had one for a while)<\/li>\n
- Cornet\/Trumpet (tried as a boy when my dad bought an old cornet at auction, but it was my brother Angus who became the trumpeter)<\/li>\n
- Oboe\/Baroque oboe (lessons from Maurice Checker while at university, but ended up just playing recorder with his group!)<\/li>\n
- Clarinet (had one and tried, but not for me!)<\/li>\n
- Bodhran (sure, I own one, but haven’t touched it for years!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
NB the main bar to violin, modern oboe and clarinet would be my lack of fingers… not so much of an issue on guitar and bass, which I play left-handed to get four fingers on the fretboard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A slip of the tongue, a Facebook post later and ‘master of nine’ seemed too good a mistake to waste, so here’s what I wrote with appended list of my non-masterly ‘skills’… Having described myself yesterday as a ‘jack of all trades and master of [oops!] nine’, I’ve tried to count the instruments I ‘play’… […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7270"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11695,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7270\/revisions\/11695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petestack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}