Introducing: The Drummer's Companion

In my early years, getting a piper to record my competition tunes was a complicated process involving cassette tapes, tape recorders and myriad technical difficulties.  On several occasions tapes stretched changing the tempo (only in certain parts of course) and were sometimes completely destroyed by hungry cassette recorders. To describe my early attempts at procuring a practice recording as "inconvenient" would be a bit of an understatement.

You would think, with all the advances in technology in recent years, that the process of getting recordings from pipers would have become a bit easier by now.  Recordings can be made on phones or other digital recorders and free software exists allowing you to edit wave files and change tempos.  Mp3s are easy to email and texting sound files makes things even easier!  However, technology is not the issue here.  The issue is time.  Pipers are just as busy now as they used to be and getting high quality recordings out to multiple members of the drum corps just so they can practice their solo material (not band related) tends to fall to the bottom of the priority list and rightly so.  Pipe majors are busy folks, so are pipe sergeants and most good band pipers are already busy learning solo repertoire of their own.  What is a competing drummer to do?

Introducing: The Drummer's Companion.  The Drummer's Companion is a library of competition pipe tunes performed by world champion piper Bruce Gandy.  Bruce's success, both as a soloist and as a band player, gives him unique insight into what drummers need in a practice recording. Bruce's playing is extremely musical and gives drummers the opportunity to play with the best of the best.  All tracks in The Drummer's Companion are recorded in pristine audio quality at FMP Matrix Studio by award winning engineer and drummer Scott Ferguson.  Among many successes over a long career in music, Scott performed with the Rankin Family as their touring drummer for the better half of a decade and engineered the Youtube sensation "United Breaks Guitars" by Dave Carroll (16,000,000 views).

To date The Drummer's Companion contains thirteen tracks:  Five marches, four strathspeys and four reels.  The next batch of recordings will be available soon.  Due to Bruce's busy schedule, we have accepted the fact that The Drummer's Companion is a long term project and will be completed over several years. MSRs will be first priority followed by Hornpipes and Jigs in the future.  It is important to Bruce and I to do things right.  Only recordings of the highest quality (those with Bruce's stamp of approval) will be made available for purchase.

Here's the track list so far:

Marches: 
Donald Cameron 
The Argyllshire Gathering 
Brigadier General Cheape of Tiroran 
Pipe Major Willie Gray's Farewell to the Glasgow Police 
The Royal Scottish Pipers Society 

Strathspeys: 
Blair Drummond 
John Roy Steward 
Maggie Cameron 
Dornie Ferry 

Reels: 
Brown Haired Maid 
Dolina MacKay 
John Morrison of Assynt House 
MacAllister's Dirk

Tracks from The Drummer's Companion can be downloaded individually HERE.  If you purchase three MSR tracks and lack the means to string them together, please send me an email and let me know and I'll combine them for you into one track at no added charge.  Check out The Drummer's Companion today and start practicing with Bruce Gandy!

 
 

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