Okay, call me slow or late to the game, but I am just now focusing on learning these most basic of ornaments: cuts, taps and rolls.
Bleah!
Okay, cuts I seem to be able to finger, but the taps and rolls are certainly going to take more work.
Addendum: It seems I have been unintentionally doing these things one some of the tunes I have learned. I just didn’t know what it was I was specifically doing!
Just don’t get these mixed up with “Stop, drop, and roll”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop,_drop_and_roll
Believe me, I’ve tried it. And I can confirm that rolling around on the floor is not considered an acceptable ornament in most pure drop trad circles.
That might tend to bend one’s whistle, eh?
How about duck 'n cover ornamentation?
duck doin’ a cover
tune
ah, song… 
If it’s acapella, does it become a tune again?
If you have trouble with your rolls, try these for fast relief:
When you get to crans:
And for nice, clean cuts:
Seems that the main problem many people new to Irish finger articulation (I don’t consider them “ornaments”) is getting the cuts and pats fast enough.
Take a “long roll on G”. If played G(Acut)G(F#pat)G, and if the A and F# are played too fat, it doesn’t really sound like a roll but more like a classical “turn”. The trick to getting it to sound like a roll is to get the A and F# so short in duration that they don’t take any appreciable time away from the melody notes GGG. It’s why I don’t consider a long roll an “ornament” (something superfluous to the melody which is added for decorative effect) but rather articulations done with the fingers.
So, whether you play GGG seperating them with tonguing or play GGG seperating them with finger action the timing of the notes GGG should sound the same. (Many beginners “crunch” their rolls, turning them into a jumble of notes, rather than keeping the melody notes cleanly seperated.)
So how does someone make their cuts and pats fast enough? With cuts it must come from sheer velocity. If you try to make your cuts shorter in duration by not lifting the finger up very much, you won’t get a clear-sounding cut. The cutting finger must come up high enough off the whistle for the cut to clearly sound.
Pats are a different thing. Watch a good whistle player or uilleann piper: rather than keeping the finger to be patted close to the instrument and simply moving the finger up and down from this “guide position” (which would result in a pat far too sluggish) the finger to be patted is actually raised some distance from the instrument a split-second before the pat, giving it the distance to achieve the required velocity. For a pat to have the right sound the finger must fully seal the hole AND it has to be fast.
I was taught to think of rolls and cuts as rhythmic devices.
I had read somewhere else that such rhythmic devices should be used properly, and not be overused, or you can ruin a song.
Correct. Less is often more. And this is where listening to other players comes into it. You learn by hearing the different styles and how they sound and you learn to figure out what you want to sound like.
Are you supposed to be still tonguing while doing the rolls?
The fun thing is that if you are playing a tune, let’s say Donnybrook Fair, you can start with the GF#G, AGA opening, then on the repeat, you can roll one of them, then on the second time through, you can roll the other or both, and you can mix it up to suit your whims. And the more you listen to recordings and after you know a tune so well you can sing it, you’ll hear them changing it up and it makes it way more interesting to listen to.
Lots of different answers here. I’ll just do one. Some people attack the beginning of some rolls with a little tongue. It’s not wrong or right, it’s a style choice and it varies from person to person, tune to tune.
About tonguing rolls, it depends on where the roll sits in the tune, and whether it’s a jig or a reel.
In jigs, where a long roll takes up an entire beat, it’s very common to tongue the first note of the roll (which doesn’t have a cut on it and happens on the beat). But I wouldn’t tongue within the roll. That would sound odd.
But in reels, where every half-bar is four eighth-notes, you have two long roll situations:
In the first situation the long roll is handled sort of like the long roll in a jig. One might tongue the first melody note on the beat but one wouldn’t break up the timing of the roll by tonguing within the roll.
In the second situation there’s an off-beat that occurs on the cut of the long roll. In a way it’s not a “long roll” but rather a “short roll” on the offbeat which happens to be preceeded by a note of the same pitch. I wish I could post sheet music examples here which would make everything very clear. Since it’s common to tongue the cut which starts a short roll on a beat, in this case a lot of people would tongue that cut.
About the issue of variation, I made a couple little videos a while back. The first shows a number of variations to the jig Sean Bui:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyj5LMH6aOI
The second, on the pipes, shows variations to the reel The Earl’s Chair.
A lot would, no doubt, but in my experience far more wouldn’t.
Entirely analogous to fiddling: while some fiddlers will start what you call the short roll here with a new bow stroke (examples that spring to mind being Kevin Burke and Kathleen Collins), the great majority will change bow on the eighth note that precedes the short roll, but not on the short roll itself.
It’s a matter of taste of course. I much prefer the more relaxed, flowing, offbeat sound you get by not articulating the short roll on both whistle and fiddle - giving what I call an “off-beat (long) roll” rather than a short roll.
General pronouncements are always a little bit dangerous: back in January 2005, Sam_T wrote:
"I was in a workshop with Mary Bergin back in October and, as you might expect, learnt just masses of stuff…
One thing in particular that has stayed with me and absorbed itself naturally into my playing is her tonguing, especially of cuts, and most especially of the cut note in rolls. She had us practising cuts really slowly, tonguing with the “cutting” finger open and then shutting it immediately to get a really crisp attack."
So, if that much-maligned organ, the tongue, requires legitimating in a roll, that’s a pretty good endorsement. You can do it or not–it really depends on what effect you aim to achieve.
Actually Jon what you describe (or rather, what Sam T describes) isn’t tonguing in a roll, but at the start of one (a short one, as it happens). I don’t think anyone is challenging that practice, or indeed tonguing at the start of a long roll.
What I and PCP were talking about just now was a slightly different kind of animal - what some think of as an eighth-note + short roll combination (in an offbeat position). MB - like the majority of whistlers - doesn’t usually tongue the “short roll” part of that particular device. Listen to, I don’t know, the Drunken Landlady, or the Flogging Reel, on her CDs, and lots of other examples. Nor does she tongue the cut note in a long roll btw.
I’m going to try to illustrate what I’m talking about… sheet music would be much better…
In a jig a bar might go | GGG F#ED | and if that GGG is articulated by first a cut and then a pat it’s a long roll and it would break up the rythm of the roll to tongue that cut (well unless you can do an extremely quick, precise, subtle, practically inaudible tongued attack, which I’m sure Mary could do). Where I would tongue is that initial G of the GGG group.
Ditto for a bar of a reel that goes | GGGA GF#ED |
But if a bar of a reel goes | BGGG DGGG | it’s a different animal because those GGG’s aren’t really long rolls; as far as timing/articulation/effect goes they’re short rolls which happen to have another note of the same pitch precede them.
Put in the backbeat and it’s | BGGG DGGG | with the bold G’s having a cut on them. Cuts which fall on a beat (or backbeat) are commonly tongued, and cuts which begin a short roll are commonly tongued, both of which apply here.
I don’t know if you’re replying to my posts PCP but I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I maintain that far fewer Irish players tongue what you call the short roll in there - that is, tonguing before your bold Gs - than those that do. The majority (including Mary Bergin, Cathal McConnell, Potts & Moloney, Donncha O Briain, for a few examples) will generally tongue the preceding eighth note. Offhand I can’t think of any noted players - apart maybe from my friend Debbie Quigley - that do tongue your bold Gs but would be interested to know of any.
I wrote about these animals and why I, for one, don’t call them short rolls, here: http://www.rogermillington.com/siamsa/brosteve/rolls4.html
I certainly agree that they’re not the same as a short roll proper, a sharply attacked thing on the beat. But they are similar in a way, in that they occur on a beat (or offbeat actually).