Pipe & Tabor for Beginners Workshop

Andy Richards will lead a workshop using the tune Shepherds’ Hey, Bucknell.

Pipe and tabor is a super and fun instrument for dance, just as it was in the earliest morris we know about in the 15th and 16th centuries, or in the 17th century when we get the earliest reference to a Cotswold morris tradition. Here is a fun video of Hunt the Squirrel:

http://www.pipeandtabor.org/2020/08/18/taborers-hunt-the-squirrel/

Our session will be extremely friendly, supportive and collaborative, and there will be a lot of laughing as we encourage each other to learn together. We will use tabor pipes in high D such as the Generation, available from the Taborers Society Price; £9.95 including postage for UK orders): http://www.pipeandtabor.org/the-pipe-and-tabor/buying-a-tabor-pipe/generation-tabor-pipes/

We will have fun holding and manipulating a tabor pipe, a stick or stick-like object such as a wooden spoon held in your leading hand, and hitting a tabor or some sort of percussion instrument (e.g. tambourine or disc of thick cardboard attached to your non-leading arm). We will enjoy very slowly learning a super morris tune Shepherds’ Hey from Bucknell, slow and dance speed versions of this will be available in advance in the Beginners Workshop Videos on the Taborers Society YouTube channel. You can see the fingers and get used to the tune. We will do some stepping to help internalize the rhythm, and there will be time for questions at the end. Sheet music of the version of the tune we learn will be at http://www.pipeandtabor.org/the-pipe-and-tabor/how-to-play-the-pipe-and-tabor/beginners-workshops/.