490 - How To Level Up Your Piping In Just 6 Months (Dojo Conversations Episode 152)
What if you could level up your piping – within 6 months?
This week, Andrew and Jim lay out a complete week by week training blueprint designed to take you into next season feeling calm, confident, and genuinely prepared.
Whether you’re aiming to move up a grade, make the band, or simply play better than you did last year, this episode gives you a clear path forward.
They break down exactly how top pipers structure their year, build tempo in a sustainable way, stay accountable, and avoid the last-minute panic that so many of us know too well. From setting up your “sacred practice space” to surviving life’s inevitable interruptions, this is a practical, no-nonsense guide to real progress.
6 months from now, you could be wishing you’d started… or you could be walking into the season feeling unstoppable.
Check out the 6-month plan here: https://www.pipersdojo.university/6monthplan
Here's what we cover this week:
- 00:00 – The coffee analogy
- 00:30 – Failure to plan is planning to fail
- 00:40 – Why now is the perfect time for a 6-month plan
- 01:40 – What “next level” really means
- 04:30 – The importance of unplugging
- 06:10 – Setting up your calendar (26–28 weeks out)
- 10:50 – Preparing your materials and practice space
- 11:40 – The sacred practice space concept
- 14:30 – Closet-door practice setup hack
- 15:30 – Why you need a recording device
- 16:00 – Creating your feedback plan
- 18:30 – Wildcards: micro and macro interruptions
- 20:10 – The maintenance routine explained
- 21:30 – Building in buffer weeks
- 23:00 – Important omissions from the plan
- 23:50 – Why tuning isn’t explicitly included
- 24:20 – Expression and phrasing: not what’s holding you back
- 26:50 – The tempo strategy explained
- 28:00 – Starting at 50% tempo
- 29:00 – The clever tempo ramping system
- 30:30 – Metronome magnification techniques
- 32:10 – Customizing the plan for your life
- 35:30 – Block 1: Tune prospects and building
- 37:30 – Block 2: Narrowing down to two tunes
- 39:30 – Block 3: Memorisation focus
- 40:00 – Testing tunes at low-stakes gigs
- 41:00 – Block 4: Painfully slow embellishments
- 45:30 – Block 5: Rhythmic accuracy (ASAP)
- 46:00 – Block 6: Go time – all bagpipes, no practice chanter
- 47:00 – The feeling of being truly prepared
- 48:00 – Wrap up & where to get the plan
