“Tight” and “loose” are really meaningless terms to describe playing rolls, if you ask me. How tight do I need to get from drinking whiskey before I’m loosened up enough to play my rolls correctly, anyway? I think what seems to get lost when most people talk about rolls and how to play them is that the roll, be it long or short, is not just one ornament but rather a combination of ornaments. The ornaments that rolls are a combination of are the cut and the tap. Cuts and taps are not notes themselves, nor are they “applied to” notes. Rather, they are articulations or note separators, no different really than note separators that involve stopping the flow of breath (such as tonguing, glottal stopping and indeed taking a breath.) The only note separator that ever gets any time value at all is the breath itself, because it replaces a note. (In classical music terms, it’s a rest, which has time value.) All other note separators (articulations) are just blips whose placement determines the time value given to the notes they separate.
So, when you play a roll, what are you really doing? You are separating (or breaking up) one long note into several shorter notes. A “long roll” typically refers to the separation of a dotted quarter note (or crotchet, on the other side of the pond) into three eighth notes (or quavers). A “short roll” typically refers to the separation of a quarter note into two eighth notes. What makes them “rolls” is that the separations are done with finger articulations (cuts and taps) rather than breath articulations. You could just as well use other articulations to achieve the same effect within the tune as you get with a roll, except that at speed tonguing and glottal stopping are much harder to do than finger articulations. Which leads me to another point that people often seem to miss when discussing rolls: The rhythm of a roll is entirely provided by the notes within the roll, not by the articulations (the cut and tap) which are nothing but blips having no time value and only serving to separate the notes from each other - albeit with different effects in terms of definition or crispness of sound than other articulations like tonguing or glottal stops. There are many ways you can break a dotted quarter into three eighth notes depending on how you decide to swing those three eighth notes (i.e. making them all absolutely equal in duration or slightly unequal, placing slightly more emphasis or pulse on one note than you do on another, etc), and the way you do it is going to be determined by what the tune is and how you’ve decided to play it. So rolls on a particular note are not just “plug and play” bits of technique that you can just clone and plop in whenever you want to. If anything is “plug and play” in terms of technique, it is the cut and tap themselves, along with the techniques for doing breath articulations. So when approaching rolls, I think it helps to realize that you are using these articulations to create a particular rhythmic effect within the tune, rather than “playing a roll”. Thus, at non-warp speed tempos you should be able to experiment with other kinds of articulation to break up the notes rather than playing a cut-and-tap roll, and see how the rhythm of the tune is not really affected. Maybe at that speed you’ll decide that glottal stops are okay, but the cut and tap seem to crispen your sound so you’ll go with them and play a roll there. Or maybe not. But at least you’ll realize that there’s more to playing a roll than just “playing a roll”.
So-called short rolls are interesting in that you are not only breaking up a quarter note into two eighth notes, you are also articulating the separation between the note before the quarter note and the quarter note. But since the note before is of a different pitch, you don’t need to articulate there, so what you’re doing is choosing to in order to add some crispness and/or enhance the rhythmic effect of the broken up quarter note. So instead of playing “note before-cut-note-tap-note”, you could just as easily play “note before-glottal-note-tap-note” or “note before-tongue-note-tap-note” or dozens of other combinations of articulations and notes, whichever sounds best and fits the way you want to play the tune. I guess my point is that it’s easy to get hung up on all the minutiae of “how to play a roll or a long roll or a short roll” and not realize that it’s all just arbitrary terminology of how to split notes and achieve a proper rhythmic feel. It’s a simple concept, yet complex, which is probably why Brad, Brother Steve, June McCormack, Grey Larsen, myself, and countless others all have our takes on it but still haven’t come up with a way to explain it verbally so that everyone else understands what we’re talking about…
) and have noticed that while I definately have a LONG way to go, I am fairly pleased with the amount and type of ornamentation I use, which is minimal use of cuts, taps and long rolls…
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