Lorne MacDougall

A few weeks ago I was producing a new single for the Red Hot Chilli Pipers’ - 343 The Fallen. 

15 years since the terrorist atrocities which took place in New York and beyond on September 11th 2001, recently retired Scottish Fireman and Red Hot Chilli Piper, Willie Armstrong has got together with Fire Department of NewYork (FDNY) Pipe Major Jimmy Lee to record a special track composed to remember the 343 Firefighters that lost their lives when the twin towers fell on that fateful day.  

I have many friends who are firefighters, I’ve played in bands with them and had sessions in pubs with them - I have no words to show the respect I have for their bravery, dedication and selflessness so I was glad to be able to show it through music. 

Willie Armstrong and Jimmy Lee have been firm friends since Jimmy invited The Red Hot Chilli Pipers over to New York in 2007 to do a fundraising concert for the families of the victims from the Fire Department of New York.  

When Willie heard the tune ‘The Fallen’ composed by Pipe Major RS MacDonald to honour the FDNY Firefighters lost at 9/11 he was so moved he knew he had to do something special with it. 

Willie gathered a few of his fellow Red Hot Chilli Pipers and, along with Jimmy and pipers from New York, they recorded the track. They also designed and filmed an emotional video which accompanies the track and honours the sacrifice that Firefighters make on both sides of the pond. 

I was lucky enough to have the full creative control of the single in terms of arrangement, instrumentation and sound.   At the start of the project, I blocked out a few days to stay in Carradale and start demoing my ideas for the structure of the track and the sound.  I’m a terrible piano player and singer but I had ideas in my head that I wanted to get out and be played by professionals so I recorded them and sent them on to be interpreted and improved on!  The whole thing came about, for me, when I was in the airport with Red Hot Chilli Piper director Willie Armstrong - it was just a coincidence we were on the same delayed flight to Toronto (drunk pilots!) - we got chatting about how to make something really special.  I began thinking about what sort of sound we’d want.  I thought it had to be dramatic.  Willie kept using words like “epic” and “hollywood” so I though we would need to find a way of involving a string orchestra.  We needed to use a pipe band, an ensemble of pipers who have player or currently do play with the Chilli Pipers.  I thought it would be nice to include some samples from the streets of New York so we got them sent over - genuine from NY recorded the day before we recording the single. 

As soon as an idea gets into my head, I start writing.  I had some lines in my head for the strings, and the vocal part and put it all together roughly.  Seonaid Aitken was the string arranger, who I worked with before, she’s invaluable - she makes sense of some real rough ideas I send her and she sends the back fully formed arrangements and fills in some of the massive gaps that I leave.  I use two pieces of software - Logic, for the ideas sessions and then onto Sibelius to score them more clearly and get a more solid structure. 

The tone of any piece is where I try to start - this couldn’t just be a sad piece, it also had to be strong, proud and uplifting.  It’s always tough to keep a piece of music like this interesting for over 5 minutes but with a few wee techniques I think we managed it.  It’s a strange thing recording, a few things happened by accident.  The pipers’ were supposed to sing the vocal part and it was never supposed to be so angelic but we ran out of time - about 8 hours before the next session I put a post on Facebook to see if anyone wanted to help out and I ended up with two of the best voices in Gaelic music - Rachel Walker and Darren MacLean - as well as Seonaid taking a break from the strings and adding to the beauty!   It was also surreal to be conducting the group of pipers - which included two of my all time heroes; the composer, RS MacDonald, and also Robert Mathieson - one of the most successful Pipe Majors of recent times.   A bit comic having to tell him to get back into rank when he wandered off to fine tune! 

Chilli Pipers’ piano player Gary O’Hagan added an extra layer of class to it with his beautiful piano lines and playing and the bands’ snare drummer Grant Cassidy added the military beat of the snare drum.  I forgot to send him any reference and what was recorded was slightly different to what I had in mind, but it worked better and gave it more light and shade. 

There were times when I thought maybe I got the whole thing wrong - theres always doubt.  Even down to things like the tempo of the tune, a couple of beats per minute can make a big difference to the emotional impact so it’s been massively reassuring to see all the comments on the video and I thank every single one of you who player a note, contributed to the arrangement or moved a fader.  And of course, to everyone who’s bough the single so far. 

Thanks to everyone involved we managed to get up to No 84 in the UK singles chart, and No 2 in the UK Rock chart!  The videos been viewed by more than 1.5 million people - thank you all so much!  I don’t think this is the last we’ve heard of this either… :)

Once again the Summer has totally caught up with me and it seems so surreal to think that Celtic Connections was already half a year ago!  That's where I'll start this blog looking back to the "Just for Gordon" Concert that took place at that very festival.  It was an enormous thrill to be invited by the Musical Directors Ross Ainslie and Ali Hutton to take part in the show with the Tannahill Weavers.  They came up with the great idea that we do one set on our own (including Gordon's most well known tune "Andy Renwick's Ferret") and also invite two of the finest Argyllshire pipers ever - Stuart Liddell and Angus McColl - to join us for a set taken straight from Gordon's "Just for Seaumus" album.  Add Bouzouki player Ross Kennedy who did the original recording and then the backing band towards the end and it made for a thrilling experience.  I also got the chance to take part in another couple of sets later on in the evening too!  Here's one of the videos of our set from the concert. 

I've been enjoying teaching recently in Oban - I was lucky enough to do part of Feis Lathurna and also weekly tuition at Oban High School's Trad Group - I started doing that in January and just finished the term off with a concert last week - it was amazing!  The standard in Oban is very high and on par with anywhere else in the country I think! 

The Tannahill Weavers have been really busy too with whom I've been playing with - there have been three tours in the first half of this year; two UK ones and a US tour all of which were great - in fact, here's a wee clip of one of the gigs here!  The last one we did was a UK tour and we started it off with a wee bit of promo on STV's "Live at Five" show - here's a clip of one of the tune sets. 

In March I got to revisit the soundtrack to "Brave" with the RSNO being conducted by the legendary Richard Kaufman. 

I've also been involved in a lot of recording in the Spring.  It's hard to believe it's been 4 years since I worked on the soundtrack to "Brave" with Patrick Doyle but it was great to get a call from his people again to record Highland Pipes and Border Pipes on the new remake of the classic film "Whisky Galore". We had a fun session in London recording all the cues and even got a tune named after me!  I recorded it along with other trad options for that particular scene so it'll be interesting to see if it makes the final cut! 

I also got a message from Ben Foster, who conducted me at the Doctor Who at the Proms Concert in 2013, to record some pipes for the new series of the cult children's TV show "Thunderbirds Are Go" which he and his brother, Nick, compose the music for - another great honour!  More recently, last week, I was in the studio recording on 3 tracks for Susan Boyle's new album - there's some fairly experimental stuff on it, so I'm really interested to hear how it turns out. 

Anyway - back to practice - I've an upcoming gig at the Gigha Music Festival at the end of June followed by some solo piping stuff and a performance with "Sketch" - until next time, here's a terrible picture of the glorious view from my window right now in Carradale, Argyll! 

Looking up the Kilbrannan Sound.

I recently got an email with this as a brief;

"We’ll be celebrating the anniversary on April 10 but we’ve already kicked off the worldwide celebration. People from more than 25 countries, including bagpipers in Scotland, Bollywood movie actors in India, a firefighter in New York City, and members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, came together to create a first worldwide “it’s a small world” video."

Well, that was an interesting project to be involved with!  I was asked to perform some pipes for Disney’s celebration of the song “It’s a Small World”.  They also asked me to think up a location that would suit the “Highland” brief that they had so I chose the Rest and Be Thankful in Argyll.  A part of Scotland which I pass almost weekly on the way home or back to Glasgow.

Originally the pipe part was in C Major! This worried be, but I quickly got looking at options for playing in C.  I knew that if I taped my C and F holes on my A Moore Chanter then I could get a C Major scale, but it would start half way up the chanter!  Luckily, the tune managed to fit on it like this so the next thing to think about was the drones.  My friends at Pipedreams Reeds sorted me out with a shorted tenor drone reed which made it tune lower and the Bass was able to tune low enough anyway and the result you can head in the attached podcast for this blog.

Do remember it wasn’t ideal conditions for playing pipes either on a wet, sleety hillside in February!  You can see the finished video here;

It’s been 6 months since the last new post, and it has been a truly amazing 6 months!

August was, as usual, a crazy month with the World Pipe Band Championships and much more.  But, before that, I was off to Derry to take part in the Derry Feis with the Campbells of Greepe.  It’s the North West’s largest celebration of Irish musical culture celebrating Irish language, verse and drama, as well as the famous Irish Dancing competition and vocal choirs.  We had a couple of events there, including a very wet one out in the street, but both were great fun to take part in.  Oh, and their CD should be released this month!  The shows were both broadcast online, here’s one of the sets from the main concert with myself on C Smallpipes.

The Campbells of Greepe ‘Maighdeannan, MacShìthich, Dà Thàbh, Fear a’ Choire’ at Fleadh Live from Fleadh Cheoil on Vimeo.

Unusually, for me, being in Derry meant that I missed quite a lot of the World Pipe Band Championships week and also Piping Live but I did manage to make it back on the Thursday for a wee play at the Street Cafe.  Also that week was the premiere of a show I had been involved with since May called “This is Ceilidh” at the Edinburgh festival which involved me having a pipe off with the all girl pipes and drum group “Skirls Aloud”.  Here’s a wee clip from the rest of the Ceilidh.

On the 6th November, we finally launched Breathe – the new album by the Red Hot Chilli Pipers which I coproduced and performed on then it was off for a 3 week tour of Austria and some of the surrounding countries with Joy Dunlop.  I was then back to London to put together and perform music for the unveiling of a new sculpture for the Famous Grouse Whisky company.  An unlikely group of musicians signifying classical, rock, jazz and folk got together and performed the Beatles’ song “Come together” as well as pieces from our individual genres, it was surreal – but worked well, I think.

Onto the Winter and I’m off on a tour with a band who I have listened and loved since I got into Traditional Music – the Tannahill Weavers.  I was thrilled to join them on this short tour of the Netherlands before hopefully joining them for more music in 2014.  As ever, some of the gigs were caught on camera so here are some clips that I have been sent.  As usual, including some very unflattering angles!

On returning from the Netherlands I was thrilled to be revisiting the score from Brave as part of Patrick Doyle’s 60th Birthday celebration alongside Emma Thompson, Derek Jacobi on stage and countless other celebs in the audience.  It was also great to be once again playing with the thrill of an Orchestra, this time the London Symphony Orchestra.

@lornemacd so looking forward to hearing those pipes again! The audience is going to love it.

— London Symphony Orch (@londonsymphony) December 1, 2013

A couple of reviews have been sent to me.

Being a bit of a Pixar lover as well (who isn’t, really?), I really enjoyed the “Brave: Suite,” which featured a selection of snippits from the film score. Featuring Lorne MacDougall and Callum Stewart (on the bagpipes and uilleann pipes, respectively), the music took me back to the movie itself. It was quite fun to listen to – and to be honest, I’m growing more fond of the bagpipes the more I hear them.

The Sound of London

Further standout moments came with a lengthy and very colourful suite from Pixar’s Brave, with glorious piping from Lorne MacDougall and Calum Stewart (Bagpipes and Uilleann Pipes respectively).

Michael Beek

Then things calmed down into December, where I have been spending a lot of time on my New Voices commission at Celtic Connections – there’s a lot of work still to be done but I’m really looking forward to it all coming together.  It takes place at the Mitchel Theatre in Glasgow at 1pm on 26th January.

Today’s première of Collisions sees him playing six different varieties of bagpipe, accompanied by guitars, strings, bass, percussion and vocals, exploring and reconfiguring his instrument’s diverse stylistic guises from Gaelic song to gothic rock, solo competition to contemporary folk.

I’ve got some very special guests also!

So, Happy New Year to everyone – hope 2014 is a good one for you all and I hope to be playing for you at some point through out it!