The Essentials

James Laughlin's Guide to Pipe Band Drumming, Volume One, The Essentials is available for free from James, and with it comes a set of MP3 recordings of the exercises.  The MP3's are great help to know how to interpret these exercises, and the MIDI files below are a supplement to this activity.

Contact James at James@Come2Drum.com to request his free books, and visit his websites: https://pipebanddrumminginnercircle.com/.  

You may obtain all the MIDI files for Volume One here or individually below.

The MIDI files below are meant to sound the same as the James' MP3 recordings, but they allow for changing the tempo, and for looping the exercises, or focusing on just a part of an exercise.  

The files are named in the form <vol><page>-<track>.<type> where <vol> is the book volume, as in "JlV1" for "James Laughlin's book volume 1", <page> is the page in the book, <track> is the track number in the recordings that come with his book, and <type> is the file type.  For example, "JlV1P19-1.mid" is the MIDI file for volume 1, page 19 of Jame's Laughlin's book, with the track recording "01".  

The other file types are generated from the corresponding MIDI file.  For example, "JlV1P19-01.wav" is the WAV equivalent.  The .zip files contain all the files of the type.  For example, "JlV1midis.zip" is a compressed file containing all the .midi files, for easy download and expansion for Midi Voyager to use.  

Please note that the MIDI files above are the ones  that provide the flexibility of looping, and changing the tempo, etc. and they are meant to be played with a midi player.  To learn how to play these MIDI files, see the instructions on the "Learn With MIDI" page.

The WAV, MP3, and OGG files are for convenience in playing in a browser, or on an audio player you may already have on your computer or mobile device.  These non-MIDI files are deliberately sped up by 25% just to make them more interesting.  (You cannot conveniently change the tempo for regular audio practice files.)