It’s been said before on this forum that too many players tongue far too much. I’ve recently been trying to play some of my repertoire without tonguing at all. It’s like learning the tune from scratch again.
In the first part of Mary Bergins “Langstern Pony,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_ySVrhBQeQ she tongues the A’s twice, but second time round she cuts the A’s twice. Trying to learn to cut or double cut( if that’s the right word) at speed is difficult to retrain.
Does anyone have some good exercises, to practice cutting instead of tonguing. I play many tunes with plenty of cuts, so it’s not cutting that’s the issue, it’s more of learning to replace tonguing with cutting, and at speed. Any advise??
I think some places work better with tonguing rather than cutting. For example, in a jig, figures which are like this: fAA fAA | eAA eAA sound good with tonguing on the A’s, especially if you make the center A’s pretty staccato and slur the 2nd A’s up to the f or e. However, for something like this in a reel: EAAB cABA I tend to use a cut on the 2nd of the 2 adjacent A’s.
Actually, I’m working on the tonguing, because I mostly learned without tonguing at all. So I guess I have the opposite of your problem. Cuts came pretty easy; my problem is consistently getting a crisp strike.
I think the problem is often not the tonguing, but how it’s done. I think there’s a large difference between “heavy” and “light” tonguing, and it’s the heavy, plosive sort that sounds wrong. It’s possible, and often desirable, to use a very light tap of the tongue on the alveolar ridge, just barely interrupting the flow of air. I tongue many cuts this way, to make them sharper. I’m no master, that’s for sure, but I prefer the sound of the cut that way.
My favorite way to practice ornaments is to get the
notes out of the way. In order to free your mind of
the notes and concentrate on the ornaments, use
something simple like scales.
For cuts, run up the scale, cutting between each
note. Assuming a D whistle… there are 6 notes in
the D scale that can be cut, so stop at the B, then
jump back to the bottom note and go up again. This
will give you 6 cuts each time up the scale. Stick to
one octave. Speed up every 4th time or so. Make
sure each cut comes on the beat, whatever you
decide that is. Use a metronome if it helps.
Then move on to playing each note in the scale
twice, cutting between the doubled notes and
between the notes up the scale. This gives you 12
cuts up the scale. Later, try playing each note
thrice. You can divide the notes as much as you
want.
Next, try staying on the low D and going up the
scale, repeating the D between each note, like this:
DE DF DG DA DB
I find it easier to tongue the D each time so I can
concentrate on cutting “up” the scale.
Incidentally, you can do the same for taps (also
called strikes) going down the scale.
Another practice I find challenging is to play a jig (without
any tonguing or other ornaments) and cut every third note.
Or every second note. Or just between measures. That also
lets you explore some interesting things about the nature of
jigs.
That’s funny. I was just thinking that I am not tonguing enough. I play most of the tunes I am learning without tonguing at all, except after breaths. I am just now trying to put in cuts and hits with notes that are of different pitches. I’ll try throwing in some tongue for good measure too
It breaks my brain for some reason. I think it’s undoing
some classical training to move the emphasis to different
places in the measure. Nothing like shaking up your status quo once in a while.
