Practice Challenge

Well-known piper Jori Chisholm, who is known for his website and being a pretty outstanding piper, made a blog post today posing a challenge: The BagpipeLessons.com 30 Day Practice Challenge.

In its statement, the challenge is simple: commit to practice your bagpipes every day for 30 days. Actually carrying it out will likely be difficult, because these things always are. I’m committing to it, and if you’re a piper I suggest you try it too.

I started tonight, just before dinner, and had a nice run through of one of my MSR sets, a 6/8 march, and the first half of a piobaireachd. Between work and finding a good practice location, I will have to scramble sometimes to get it in, but I’m going to give it a shot. Ideally I’d like to manage a good session on both pipes and practice chanter every day, but thinking realistically I’ll shoot for playing pipes each of the 30 days. This challenge could help me quite a bit, since my first competition of the 2010 season is just before the end of the month.

To help you keep track, Jori has posted a checklist on his blog, available for download and printing. It might be a good idea to use the list to sketch out a practice schedule, or some goals.

Speaking of goals, I’ll plan to post a few goals I have for this challenge in the next day or so. Feel free to comment with some of your goals as well. Happy piping, and practice hard.