cool studio gig: Battleship

**OC Richard** · 19th October 11, 04:49 AM

The other day Aaron Shaw, the piper of Wicked Tinkers (and a piping judge) got a call from 20th Century Fox to round up five pipers for a new movie called Battleship.

It was a studio gig, that is, we'll be heard but not seen!

The music was challenging. One "cue" was a fairly fast thing which had Fnaturals and Cnaturals throughout; one cue had a big fat High G# which we had to nail in tune.

It went slowly by studio standards, because we had to spend time tuning notes not normally played on the pipes.

Here we are L-R Kevin Weed, Yours Truly, Aaron Shaw (of Wicked Tinkers), Eric Boyd (of the Celtic rock band 1916), and John Allan (of the Celtic rock band Stand Easy).

**Guinness>water** · 19th October 11, 05:21 AM

Wow, thats cool. You should feel good about your self being invited to play beside Aaron Shaw! I imagine thats a pretty big honor.

**piperdbh** · 19th October 11, 09:19 AM

How many rolls of electrical tape did you use up covering those holes?

**OC Richard** · 20th October 11, 04:58 AM

Originally Posted by piperdbh

How many rolls of electrical tape did you use up covering those holes?

Actually the different pipers used different approaches to getting the Cnaturals and Fnaturals.

Most of the guys used the alternate fingerings, but for some reason my chanter (with its present reed) won't do a crossfingered Cnatural so I had to tape it down.

About tape, all of us had tape on every hole from the get-go; the big oval-hole McCallum band chanters which most of us were using are intended to have tape at the edge of every hole all the time.

I think that among us five there were five different kinds of tape! I use Gaffer's tape; Eric had some kind of black electrical tape from the UK which I'd not seen before; Aaron had a clear tape I'd not seen before.

We were saying that it would have been a lot easier if we had had the Breton chanters with adjustable holes that McCallum makes for the Bagads.