I agree with Chas, and I think a lot of others here, that geezer speed is plenty fast enough. A good steady lilting rhythm and minimal ornamentation that shows off the melody nicely beats a race to see who can finish first and cram in everything on the way any day.
Perhaps we disagree, but, if so, not on the basis of anything you say here I think. Well perhaps the idea that playing at normal speed some of the time during the learning process is a point of disagreement.
If all there were to learning rolls was to play them slowly the way you describe, complete with exaggerated finger movements, and then gradually speed up, all the while maintaining steady rhythm, then the following experiment should work. Take a piece you can play well at normal speed, say a reel just to be concrete about it. Record it at that speed. Next slow it down as much as you possibly can and play it the way you recommend, complete with exaggerated finger movements and record it at that speed. Now speed up the recording until you reach the tempo you recorded the first version. If playing slowly where all that there were to learning rolls, the two versions should be nearly identical. This is obviously an empirical matter by I predict they wouldn’t be. First, I don’t think the rolls would sound quite right; this would have something to do with the duration of the blips and something to do with the exaggerations. Second, I doubt that what you’d hear would be a good reel rhythm. If I’m right about this, then playing rolls up to speed and incorporated in dance tunes involves something other than the start-slow-and-speed-up method.
I’d be really interested to hear the results if someone with the technique and the equipment were actually to try this experiment. Of course, even if it did work for an experienced player, it wouldn’t disprove my theory for beginners because it might be possible for an experienced player to maintain a good reel rhythm at half tempo or slower but not possible for a beginner or intermediate player.
Let me explain why I predict as I do by going back to rock guitar. Chuck Berry licks wouldn’t come out right played slowly because a rock song played very slowly becomes a slow blues and the temptation to phrase as though you were playing a slow blues would be irresistable. So, sped up, you wouldn’t have rock and roll, you’d have something that sounded exactly like what it was: a slow blues sped up. Also the licks would sound wrong. Integral to rock phrasing on guitar is sustain. You lose that when you slow down and try to compensate in other ways. (Something like this happens on other instruments.) That is not a good way to learn good rhythm although, when you can play the licks roughly at or near speed, it is a good way to finesse them in certain ways.
So there is a role for playing slowly and an important one. In practice, I suspect that when first learning rolls at super-slow pace, people still practice playing unornamented dance tunes at or near speed to develop good dance rhythms.
It seems to me you need to learn tunes playing them near if not at proper tempo, so you get the feel of the rhythm correct. And you need to learn the techniques of playing ornaments slowly, so that you can make your fingers move correctly.
I’ve been starting to suspect there is too much emphasis on learning to play ornaments, and not enough emphasis on learning to play with the proper swing and feel…
This is an important lesson that I learned as a classical guitar player. The ring finger and little finger share a tendon sheath on their way past the wrist toward their respective muscles in the fore arm. This makes it very difficult, and impossible for some people, to move these two fingers independently. When playing the guitar with the fingers ( i.e., not with a pick) the player has to let the little finger “tag along” with the ring finger. Trying to keep the little finger still causes muscle tension to increase and impairs the movement of the ring finger. It stands to reason that the same principle would apply when playing whistle or flute. The hands need to be relaxed. Any excess tension will reduce the speed and accuracy of the fingers.
Mike
You’re gettin’ the hang of it now colomon .
The trick is to develop a relaxed swinging rhythm and once you’ve got that flowing freely the ornamentation kinda drops into place of its own free will.
Each tune has its own unique character and personality,in a manner of speaking. When you get to know the tune as a living breathing entity then the playing becomes effortless and you become a channel through which this personality speaks.
Now I know that this may sound very new - agey dippy hippy but I’ve been doing this for thirty three years now and this is the best way I can think of to describe the process of playing this music has it is meant to be played.
Slan,
D.
[quote="colomonI’ve been starting to suspect there is too much emphasis on learning to play ornaments, and not enough emphasis on learning to play with the proper swing and feel…[/quote]
Listen to some of the old timers-- many of them didn’t use much ornamentation at all, but they were rhythmic as all getout. This stuff IS dance music after all, and a dancer can only dance just so fast…
Weirdly enough, I got the message listening to old 1970s recordings of the band Ryan’s Fancy. It seems like nearly every LP of theirs has at least one whistle solo (played by Dennis Ryan, I believe), and in all of that music, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him play a roll. It’s not brilliant stuff, but the music sounds nice. I know I’ve done a lot of playing that was less musical, even though (and maybe partially because!) it was full of rolls.
Listening to other old timers, I’m never sure if I’m just not hearing some of the ornaments – rolls I can always hear, but other stuff can be more subtle. But I know, for instance, Peter Horan plays a eighth followed by a quarter (I assume split by a cut) in a lot of places where I would have done a roll, and dang, I like the way he sounds doing that.
This is part of the reason why I’ve mostly given up on crans. They’re a nice special effect, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard an old timer play one…
I never found the A and B rolls to be much harder than the other rolls. I had a lot of problems learning all of them when I was a novice, but I never found these two to be much harder than the rest. One thing though, which is very hard (and I still can’t do it..
) is the D roll.. or cranning (I think they call it that).
My worst enemy when I play the whistle is the speed.. I tend to play too fast or too slow.. and I seldom find the “correct” pace for the tunes.
Rolls? Who needs 'em: Just crann at every available opportunity. You’re sure to make friends wherever you go with this strategy. Trust me. 
Loren
What I disagree with is indeed playing up to speed during learning.
If all there were to learning rolls was to play them slowly the way you describe, complete with exaggerated finger movements, and then gradually speed up, all the while maintaining steady rhythm, then the following experiment should work. Take a piece you can play well at normal speed, say a reel just to be concrete about it. Record it at that speed. Next slow it down as much as you possibly can and play it the way you recommend, complete with exaggerated finger movements and record it at that speed. Now speed up the recording until you reach the tempo you recorded the first version. If playing slowly where all that there were to learning rolls, the two versions should be nearly identical. This is obviously an empirical matter by I predict they wouldn’t be. First, I don’t think the rolls would sound quite right; this would have something to do with the duration of the blips and something to do with the exaggerations. Second, I doubt that what you’d hear would be a good reel rhythm. If I’m right about this, then playing rolls up to speed and incorporated in dance tunes involves something other than the start-slow-and-speed-up method.
I’d be really interested to hear the results if someone with the technique and the equipment were actually to try this experiment. Of course, even if it did work for an experienced player, it wouldn’t disprove my theory for beginners because it might be possible for an experienced player to maintain a good reel rhythm at half tempo or slower but not possible for a beginner or intermediate player.
We are back to the “why do we find rolls difficult?” thread, aren’t we? I am not concerned here with teaching how to hear rolls, but rather with how to play them. Even if you know what a roll sounds like (and it’s not like there is only one way to play them), it doesn’t mean you can play one. The issue is control and precision. I think in order to gain control and precision you need to slow down and play rolls evenly. Before you have control playing up to speed is useless and worse: it may give bad habits (of course I did it & do it nevertheless).
About the issue of the duration of blips: The ideal is none. Of course that is impossible, and of course slowdowned music will have longer blips than music played slow. But it is not about that at all, to my mind. It is about control and attack: the cut/tap is the attack to the note that follows, and not an additional note. Put differently: The blip is a regulatory ideal in the Kantian sense.
Let me explain why I predict as I do by going back to rock guitar. Chuck Berry licks wouldn’t come out right played slowly because a rock song played very slowly becomes a slow blues and the temptation to phrase as though you were playing a slow blues would be irresistable. So, sped up, you wouldn’t have rock and roll, you’d have something that sounded exactly like what it was: a slow blues sped up. Also the licks would sound wrong. Integral to rock phrasing on guitar is sustain. You lose that when you slow down and try to compensate in other ways. (Something like this happens on other instruments.) That is not a good way to learn good rhythm although, when you can play the licks roughly at or near speed, it is a good way to finesse them in certain ways.
So there is a role for playing slowly and an important one. In practice, I suspect that when first learning rolls at super-slow pace, people still practice playing unornamented dance tunes at or near speed to develop good dance rhythms.
I do think that you can learn to play a proper reel rhythm at 60 bpm, and that you are not condemned to play it like a hornpipe because you slow it down.
I think what comes to mind to me in this discussion is a recording I sent to Bloomfield and a few others some weeks ago. It is a recording my son made during his whistle class of his teacher playing the reel the Ships are Sailing. First very slowly, showing the full onamentation and perfect phrasing and then after the tune at speed. That’s how the kids are taught here and they end up sounding mighty in the process.
Noel Hill works the same way in his concertina class, first goign over the tune very slowly phrase by phrase, showing the ornamentation and then going up to speed after, always retaining the proper rhythm.
This is how I do it when I am learning from a recording (without the dots). I go slowly, but keep the ornamentation there as it is played in the recording. Later on, I “make it my own” so to speak. I’m just not as good when I’m ONLY learning from sheet music…but if I keep going on that this could very well develop into the “sheet music vs. no sheet music” debate 
I wouldn’t expect a slowed down reel necessarily to sound like a hornpipe when speeded up. (60 bpm is way too slow for a hornpipe.) It might, but it might just as well sound like a very poor reel or perhaps like nothing in particular. I just don’t know.
That’s why I suggested speeding up slow performances, both by good players and by beginners. I think it would be instructive to know whether a well-played slow reel would sound like a well-played fast reel when speeded up. I suspect that it wouldn’t, but I don’t have the software to put it to the test.
I won’t comment on the other details of your post because I think we have reached the stage where the law of diminishing fleas begins to apply. But I have just one comment on a difference of opinion which I think is nowhere near as great as you seem to think it is.
I don’t doubt that people can be taught in the way you recommend and Peter confirms to be the way it is done where he lives. But that doesn’t mean that everything going into the teaching is being accounted for in the way you conceptualise it. Perhaps it is. But it seems to me just as likely that, as the student speeds up, he or she is making subtle adjustments to keep good rhythm. Since the teacher is, presumably, an excellent player, and the student is learning by ear, the student will pick up the adjustments needed to make a reel swing at any tempo from the playing of the teacher. The student who has no teacher, or who has a bad teacher, has no model for making these adjustments. If I’m right, that student is going to have to practice at or near the tempo of a good recorded version of the tune to develop good rhythm.
I’m really curious to know what would happen if you applied my speed up test to something recorded by both a good player and a promising beginner. If I’m wrong, it would show that Irish music is, in certain respects, starkly different from some other folk musics in a way I would find surprising. If I’m right, it wouldn’t show that the traditional method of teaching is wrong. What it would show is that people reflecting on what goes into that teaching are fixating on some aspects and taking others for granted. This isn’t something the student who has a good teacher would need to know. But the teacher should know it. And so too should the student who has no teacher.
FWIW I just ran the MP3 from my son’s whistle class at 150 percent of the speed at which it was played as a first example to show all ornaments and phrasing. The rhythm of the teacher playing the tune slowly came out sounding virtually identical to how it sounded when the teacher played it at speed.
That’s worth quite a lot I think. Thanks for giving it a go. It’s not conclusive but it’s very suggestive. (It would be conclusive if he couldn’t yet play up to or near speed.)
I know from personal experience teaching rock and blues guitar that this slow-down-and-work-up approach doesn’t work as a stand alone method. (I started teaching in the days before there were any how-to manuals and I tried teaching this way.) So this is a very interesting fact about Irish music.
On thing I meant to add about this: I am not saying that rolls are difficult. I don’t think they are, once the penny drops. They start feeling very relaxed, natural and easy after a while. But you do have to keep your finger movements crisp and precise, and that’s what the flute player was talking about.
I know that learning techniques is a really important topic, but at the end of the day we all learn differently, and weither you learn by playing slow, fast, in the cold, on a beach in Mexico, etc, listening is what can really brings the phrasing to your music, in my opinion anyway. It sounds cheesy, but I think that if you try to reproduce what you ear from good recordings (or live music!) and you can manage to do it kinda efficiently, it’s somewhat irrelevant to try to sort out the best learning techniques. I have the feeling that the real reason why those youngsters in Clare end up being mighty musicians is mostly because they are around lotsa music and end up listening to a lot of that stuff.
By the way, you should listen to Jack Murphy’s recent post on Clips, it’s a good example on how well you can play just by listening a lot
It might be cheesy but it’s still true. I like cheese, anyway: real cheese, that is. The theory comes into play as a practical issue either when you can’t do it efficiently or, in my case as a teacher, when you think that there must be an easier way to teach it than the way I learnt.
The difficult thing for me–being an older beginner–was in making my fingers do what I wanted them to do when I wanted to do them. I could hear what I was trying to do, in my head, but I couldn’t train the fingers. Old dog, new tricks and all that. I’m sure that for many people, the learning is easier, because of age and/or natural ability. And there are many who are worse off than I, I suppose. I just couldn’t believe/accept that it wouldn’t come more quickly to me. For a while it didn’t come at all. I kept at it and I’m really pleased with any progress I make.
You know, every so often I log onto the board and read quotes that make me feel so much better about my whistle playing. Here’s a great example:
Im my experience it takes about a year of 10 min a day to get rolls under your belt. After that the A and the B rolls will continue to be the iffy ones. As a professional ITM flute player said to me once when I complained about having to work on my A rolls: “you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life; we all have to.”
I’ve been playing for 2 years now, and the A and B rolls are still stubborn for me. Hearing that others struggle with them too is very reassuring.
As for my learning process, I have a great teacher, which helps shorten the learning curve. I’ve also found the Grey Larsen book is INVALUABLE for learning ornaments properly. My rolls improved massively as a result of working through his exercises.
Cheers!