10,000 Hours

First posted Apr 11th, 2012 by newpiper


I read an article today that mentioned, among other things, the concept that it takes 10,000 hours to gain mastery of something. Aside from the issues around how anyone knows this, who has counted, and exactly what constitutes "mastery" this is a scarily large amount of time. It amounts to three hours a day for ten years.


Three hours a day is amazing in itself. I spend 10 hours a day travelling too and from and being at work. Take another 7 for sleeping. Then meals need to be cooked and eaten and the basics of housework done. Remove a couple more hours for distractions - the allotment, knitting, needlepoint, sewing, baking, reading. Even when I do get my pipes out time is spent blogging about it (ahem!), fiddling with batteries in the recorder, and so on. Today I got to spend a very rare and very precious 2 hours or so sitting on the sofa with my fan listening to some of the haul of CDs we brought back from Ireland (Dulahan, Hayes Senior and Junior and Floriane and Dermot). I wouldn't give that up for any amount of mastery.


So, I'm trying to get back to listening to Scottish tunes and pipes tunes, and poked about on YouTube yesterday looking at various things. Definitely want to learn the Atholl Highlanders. It's a classic pipe tune and also sounds good at sessions. At the moment my problem with it is that it needs to be played faster than I can manage. After my heavy reliance on G graces the D grace on A is proving tricky. My best shot is poor, to say the least. I will work on it. I do need to get faster at lots of tunes. I also need to get up the stamina (and repertoire) to play tunes back to back in proper sets.


The Halsway Schottische is coming on OK, although there are some notes in the B part that keep throwing me. Again, speed is an issue. Still hoping to post a version here soon.


In the meantime I managed to record Mull of the Mountains. Played it three times. This was the only one with a set of working batteries in the recorder, and naturally the only one I managed to fluff notes in. My drones aren't happy. Retuned twice in half an hour of playing and I'm still not convinced they are right. Not sure what's upset them - perhaps having been abandoned for a week they are sulking. However, I feel the tune is sustained nicely - fairly even tempo and sound. I also played both parts twice quite comfortably, without needing a lie down afterwards. It ends rather abruptly though - could have done with a sustained note at the end.


Recording - Mull of the Mountains. Lost.