Do You Own Your Piping Skills... Or Rent Them?

Is it better to own a house, or rent one?

For most of us, the idea of owning your own home is definitely preferable to renting. Once it's yours, the possibilities are endless. You can remodel the whole thing if you want to! You're in control – and you have total creative freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want.

Owning your own home is a capital investment. And when you're actively working on improving as a piper or drummer, it's kind of the same thing.

Each time you practice productively, you're investing in capital of a different kind – skill capital. Building up strong foundational skills (or rebuilding, if you skipped some important stuff in your early development) is the bedrock of having the kind of creative freedom we all strive for.

It can feel like a 'waste of time' or like you're stepping backwards to work on your fundamentals again. Working on crisp, controlled gracenotes isn't always much fun, and can feel like repetitive and tedious work, especially when your bandmates are having fun jamming out tunes at full speed while you're working hard.

But the beauty of investing in fundamentals is that they compound, and complement each other as you develop.

Those gracenotes? Combine them, and you have clean, controlled embellishments in record time.

Playing new music to practice sightreading? You're also working on cleaner scale navigation, new combinations of melody notes and embellishments, and your understanding of new rhythms and musical patterns.

It's important to remind ourselves of this as we go through the improvement process. It can feel like we're desperately far away from achieving creative freedom while we're working towards it, but if you look carefully as you go, you'll notice that you're already reaping plenty of rewards along the way.

Do you want to enjoy the process more as you develop your piping skills? Check out this Dojo Conversations podcast as Jim and I discuss the journey to bagpipe freedom in detail!