Hello all,
Just curious about tongue cut notes. Do most of you tongue at the same time you cut on a note or not.
Or is it the kind of thing you pick and choose when you tongue or not,I’m finding that it gives it a nice churp by tongueing at the same time you cut a note, just curious?
I always tongue directly on the grace note of the cut… I like the effect 
My view is that tonguing a cut is pretty LOUD and that you want to use it carefully. It’s a style question, though, and if you’ll listen to Mary Bergin’s Drunken Landlady you’ll hear a lot more of it than you will elsewhere, especially with the older whistlers. My plan is to master playing whaterevery I want with tongued notes or cuts and to use tongued cuts only later. Or at least judiciously.
Second Bloomfield. Sometimes tonguing a cut note
works beautifully. Often, though, it’s better
to just do the cut. Tends to sort itself out…
What? There’s a second Bloomfield? I want him shot. Now.
I’ve developed a habbit of tonguing cut notes and especially the first cut note of a short roll. I hadn’t even realised I was doing this until my whistle tutor pointed it out to me…he suggested I try and stop doing this until I can choose to tongue/not tongue. He said it’s not a bad thing to do, but that I should be picking where I want to do it…not just doing it out of habbit.
-Brett
Oh dear. I suppose ‘I second Bloomfield’ would
have been still worse.
P.S. In highschool I bought a used economics
text. The previous owner, one Edie Gross, had
written her name on every page. Soon the
rumor was going around that I had it bad
for Edie Gross, so bad that I had written
her name on every page of my economics
book. My friend, Jerry, told me he could
fix the problem if only I lent him the
book overnight. Desperate, I complied.
Next day I opened the book. He had
written ‘Death to…’ in front of every
‘Edie Gross.’
LOL.
P.S.
She may not have been pretty, she may not have had an easy time of it, but Edie Gross lives on in legend and song.
P.P.S.
That’s what you get for writing your name on every page.
You should definitely be able to pick and choose.
Many times a cut is used as a device to separate two notes of the same pitch precisely because it allows you to articulate them without having to tongue. This gives you a nice Irish slippy-slidy feel to a passage and a great many players generally don’t tongue in such figures.
Tonguing a cut note that falls on a strong beat gives you an extra punch however that is very effective, and a great many players do this very often.
But in both these cases and others as well, it’s always a question of going for the sound you want to achieve in the particular piece at the particular time you’re playing it. You don’t have to do things the same way as everyone else, and you don’t have to do things the same way every time.
Another question is whether to do a double grace note with your cut - i.e. whether to sound the main note momentarily before playing your cut, or to start with the cut.