Hyperextension
How locate your physical perimeter to calibrate your fine motor control
Fine motor control requires a high degree of tactile precision. In Irish music, tunes go by rapidly, often littered with grace notes, rolls, and crans. Calibrating how and when fingers should lift and drop on an instrument is like focusing on a small target positioned at a distance.
It is essential that grace notes be precisely timed, especially on the uilleann pipes, since ornamentation is fundamental for communicating the downbeat.
The difficulty in cultivating fine motor control for precision is not insignificant. The difficulty is due to the fact that pipers often do not have a method for tactile calibration on the chanter. It is my aim to give you one here.
Calibration is about prepping two things to be in the proper relation to each other: the finger and the finger hole.
Complex ornaments and triplets often fail because hand muscles are overly tightened. The desire to produce a rapid or sudden sound creates excess tension which wrecks timing.
Sudden, rapid movements often fail because calibration is off. In an attempt to play a grace note, finger muscles often seize in an attempt to move, but tightness works against precision and speed.
The way to calibrate is a practice called hyperextension.
Hyperextension
Hyperextension means moving a finger further from the instrument than it would normally move.
At dance tempo, a finger lifts about 1-5cm from the chanter to play a note (distance varies depending on speed and style). In hyperextension, lift your finger from the instrument until you begin to feel the webbing stretch between your fingers.
Doing this exercise—hyperextending the fingers involved in a roll, cran, or triplet 5x in a row—will help your hands tactily calibrate.
Say you are working to smooth out a second-octave g-f#-e staccato triplet.
Do this:
