Pancelticpiper made the following comment in another thread:
In jigs and reels alike, the things I’m calling long rolls start on the beat:
jig: | G(cut)G(pat)G BAG | (just a made-up bar for example)
reel: | G(cut)G(pat)GA BAGA |
Short rolls likewise begin on a beat:
jig: | (cut)G(at)GA BAG |
His comment got me to wondering if there are any general rules or guidelines on placing articulations and ornaments like “start rolls on the beat.” Now, I realize music is a flexible medium and rules are made to be broken. Still, some general guidelines on placing ornaments could be helpful to us noobs until we get all this figured out.
Hi Peter, can you think of a recording - perhaps one of your own, that demonstrates the effective use of short-rolls?
I’m trying to come to terms with them at the moment - training my ears to hear them. All I have at the moment is Brid’s version of Kid on a mountain - where I believe she’s using short rolls on the B in part 4. Could be wrong. Help?
Not only are there no general rules, but in fact, “start rolls on the beat” only makes sense if you use a certain definition of “roll” that calls rolls started not on the beat something else. (Like, “That’s not a long roll starting on an off-beat, it’s an eighth note on the off-beat followed by an on-the-beat short roll of the same pitch.”) This board has had long, extremely unproductive threads on exactly that question – searching for “offbeat roll” will probably bring some of them back to the surface, but it won’t shed any light on the subject. Because there is no real standard terminology or standard playing practice, all you can do is agree to disagree. (And of course, listen, as Peter says.)
Yes it can get pretty ridiculous, trying to come up with ways of verbalising a non-verbal thing.
Makes you just want to shout “shut up and play!”
But, on the other hand, I taught workshops for many years and still have students, and I’ve found that many people are more quickly able to grasp how to do something if it’s broken down and verbalised. (And a lot of people don’t- the pure “ear learners”.)
What I was trying to get at is the difference in what can be called long rolls and short rolls (some people deny even this terminology…actually some people refute any terminology whatever).
To me, a “long roll” proper is a legato unit, and occupies an entire beat of a jig, or occupies the first three-quarters of a beat in a reel.
It’s flowing, sort of “lah lah lah”.
To me, a “short roll” proper begins on a beat and is a sharply attacked thing, sort of “choh-doh”. This can occupy any place in a jig or reel that’s on a beat, and often occupies the last half of a four-note group in a reel, preceeded by the same note. It’s this figure which has the same notes as a long roll, but an entirely different effect.
Of course you can have two notes of the same pitch that occupy the same space as a short roll, but don’t have that sound at all, a legato-ish “lah lah”, begun without a cut and having a cut or pat in the middle.
I’m fully aware that this “short roll/long roll” thing does not exhaust the possiblities- in fact I wrote a post a while back giving fifteen or twenty ways of varying a simple one-bar phrase in a simple jig, most of which involved shifting rolls about.
In a jig or a reel, a short roll can start on a beat or be “postponed” as I call it, etc etc.
Let’s face it: it’s impossible to verbalise music in any satisfactory way.
If you happen to have access to the Grey Larsen book (Irish Whistle and Flute) he does a pretty good job of helping you with short rolls. One of the cool things is that he uses The Sporting Pitchfork throughout the book as a teaching tool and so in the Long Roll section he fills it with long rols, then in the Short Roll section he replaces a lot of them with short rolls followed by an eighth note. Since it’s both on paper and on a CD, you can see and hear it.
As I said, you have defined the terms so your statement is correct. But many people do not define the terms this way, including both Grey Larsen and L.E. McCullough, whose reference works are positively filled with dotted quarter note rolls off the beat.
Who’s right? My inclination is that both sides are trying to cram very complex concepts into very simple pigeonholes…
Agree with your last statement. With regard to the bit in italics, for teaching purposes I coined the term “off-beat roll” for these animals.
But lots of people call them short rolls. I think it depends on how you articulate them. I prefer the sound you obtain (on fiddle and whistle) when you slur into the “off-beat roll”. Example: B .(E E{a}E{D}E) (parentheses indicates tie, dot indicates tonguing or glottal stop or bow stroke or whatever you please sir)
Other people articulate the off-beat roll (i.e. tongue or change bow direction after the pick-up note). Example BE .E{a}E{D}E
This tends to make them sound virtually indistinguishable from an on-beat short roll, so people who do things this way don’t need a separate term.
Don’t get overexcited yet, I am always on the lookout for clips that I like that will serve a useful purpose on the transcription page. I have a few in mind, the first of which I originally posted to my post above. I re-thought that (see above). Anyhow, you’re still on the ‘other’ forum, the whole clip is posted there in the ‘whistler at Crehan’s’ thread.
I have used June McCormack’s Fliuit book to help me learn. After a while you kind of get a pattern set up of where these things tend to occur and you just find yourself putting them in automatically. At least that’s my experience. I’m no expert though and certainly not up to pancelticpiper’s standards.
What do you do for a tune like Wise Maid where I it could be done with something like 5 Fs in a row? What kind of a roll is that?
Now about these long sequences of rolling, I learned a lot of my playing from an old Clare fluteplayer named Ray Tubridy (cousin to Michael, so he said), who had this thing where from time to time he would do a series of pats on G, resulting in a large number, maybe seven or so, G’s in a row. It was a peculiar variation he did in a number of reels.
For example, here’s a portion of the second part of a reel (all the notes are in the second octave)
|dggf ggdg | ggbg ageg |
now every now and then Ray would instead play
| dggg gggg | ggbg ageg |
the initial dggg being D to a long roll on G, but all the following G’s being seperated by pats.
Ray never tongued, and used cuts and pats exclusively for articulation.
Tom Morrison would do extended series of short rolls on the same note.
Hello, I don’t know if this is of any help to you because I’m not sure where the difficulty is in distinguishing short rolls. You can hear they are executed with a tongued cut, very different sound to a long roll. This piece starts off with a pair of quavers (high D and low B) followed by a crotchet low B. This is typically an obvious place to do a long roll on those B’s. however if you listen you’ll hear that it’s played like this instead: High D, tongued B then tongued short roll on B. There is also a short roll on the G in the second part.
