Do people do exercises, non tune based practice, to work on inserting grace notes in tunes at will?? I am familiar with cuts to seperate 2 notes, but I cannot just play a grace note wherever I want as I’m not used to it and lose track of the tune after playing it.
Can anyone recommend any good exercises or is it a case of just working on 5 or 10 tunes and hoping it will filter through and become fluent in your playing after a while??
I have to work on this as any of the players I really like all seem to use a lot of grace notes and it is something I’ve neglected for a long time.
I do sometimes do scales of cuts and taps (cutting between each note upward and tapping
on each note downward), or even scales of rolls, but mostly, I’ve just been mutilating various
tunes with varying amounts of ornamentation.
I find that adding ornaments to a tune learned without them cuts the speed of that tune
tremendously for a good time. At least as long as it took to learn the tune. Tunes that I learn
with ornaments in place seem to come up to speed just as fast as any learned without.
Isolate the thing you want to do and then practice just that little component part very slowly. However slowly you have to to play it with out making mistakes. Perfect practice makes perfect.
Play the note before the grace, the grace, and the note after the grace.
Then play it in time (remember, very slowly… perfectly)
You might try mixing it up a bit as well. Like:
(lowercase are the grace notes)
Df#E
DgF#
DaG
DbA
Dc#B (see the pattern?)
then shift it up a notch…
EgF#
EaG
EbA… and so forth across the range of the instrument.
Some moves will be more difficult than others. Plan on it and take your time. Remember, perfection is the goal.
You can do the same for practicing downward leaps.
You know this brings up other issues for me. When I was thinking about learning tunes with the grace notes in them I realised I haven’t learned any tunes like that. I mean I haven’t practised as much over the past 2 years, but even when I have been I was just playing the tunes I already know so I kind of know those tunes already without grace notes making it a bit more difficult to introduce them.
Scott, I think I have done the sort of exercises you mention there although I started this thread as it was those very exercises that didn’t seem to help when I tried to put it into practise in actual tunes. Like I said when I tried it in a tune I ended up forgetting what came next. Kind of like being used to doing something a certain way then someone slipping something else in there to throw you off.
You can do the same for practicing downward leaps.
Now there’s something I haven’t practised as much and again it’s something that I really like when I hear it in other peoples playing.
Yeah guys. Those posts helped me think a bit. Many thanks.
There are a number of excellent video tutorials dealing with the Low Whistle but applicable to the high whistle too - better than some commercial tutorial videos - on Kerry Whistles site: http://www.kerrywhistles.com/dl.php?group=15
I find that isolated practicing is extremely productive, though it’s also possible to get there by just playing. I think of it like sports: you can get stronger playing basketball, but you’ll get stronger faster if you lift weights with specific muscles.
Pretty cheesy but it’s the best I could come up with.
Another good exercise (using the same lowercase/uppercase system as before)
Practice with a metronome at a slow tempo, and try to make each cut as splintering fast as possible while landing perfectly in time on each click.
Kill two birds with one stone by adding a tongue-edness before each cut.
B-tongue-B-c-B
It will put the exercise into triplets.
Make up your own exercises. If your playing a tune and continually have trouble with a certain something, create an exercise where you play that something over and over from every angle till you can nail it. Might take a day, a week, a month . . . I’ve been unhappy with my crans since I started 6 years ago. still working on 'em.
Here’s how I was trained to practice pieces (but this is classical training):
Isolate the part that is giving you problems. In this case, it would not be the part giving you problems, but the part that you want to play the ornament in. So you would be working on two or three, or maybe up to five notes.
Master that part by starting so slowly you can’t make a mistake, and then slowly increasing the tempo. Be sure that you don’t increase so much that you make mistakes. You don’t want to practice mistakes, because your neurons “remember” what you do, whether it is right or wrong.
Once you have that part up to speed, start by playing a small section before the bit you have just learned, and play through through just a bit after that part. Start slowly enough so that you don’t make mistakes and work up to speed.
Keep on working out, so that you are playing more before the bit you worked on, and more after the bit you worked on, until you feel that you will be able to work it in to the piece without issue.
I also learned this trick: Practice the end of tunes. All to often, when we practice, we work from beginning to end. And so we tend to play the beginning of the tune much more than the end. And I, at least, tend to remember the beginning of a tune more easily than the end. So I will often work on the last two bars of a tune until I master it, then work on the last four bars of the tune, and so forth, working my way up to the whole tune.
I read, and have experienced, that you can teach yourself to halt when you get to a hard part and it is very hard to unteach yourself that. Oh, I see you said that. So that’s why it’s good to immediately isolate the problem parts and get those to be the strongest parts of the tune and to work on blending those parts in seamlessly.
I found making up an exercise in which I practiced cuts in all possible situations to be helpful. Then when I came across a place in a tune where it seemed like a cut would sound good, it wasn’t as hard to work it in—my fingers had some experience. But it still took some effort. I guess I did work it in before I knew the piece really well.
I’m just a beginner so my experience is very limited.
Thanks for that, Fluti. Just to confirm something mentioned earlier by Scott about grace notes when going down the scale.
Say I’m going from B TO A. Would I only use the C as a grace note?? It makes it sound a lot more busy if I cut with the c finger (the first finger on the whistle) and then put that finger back down before playing the A. So I’m actually using 2 very short grace notes. BcbA
This doesn’t sound like a triplet because of the timing of it, but is it right. I’m sure that’s how the pros do it?? Listening to Mike McGoldrick his cuts often have that edge to them and I’m sure he’s doing as I mentioned above.
First, the disclaimer: I have a lot of music experience, but it is as an oboist in an orchestra setting. I have some Irish experience, in a band, but it was in a geographically isolated area, and I made it up as I went, so doing the ornamentation right is pretty new to me too. But you can trust that if I post something, it’ll either be correct, or I’ll tell you the source so you can judge for yourself.
That being said – here is how I have learned the bare bones, basic cut from Grey Larson’s book, and it is working pretty well for me. I would play it like this:
B: X00 000
cut: 000 000
A: XX0 000 ← I would put the two fingers down for A at the same time, unless you want that B to be in there. Larson also talks a lot about the many, many different ways you can do it, based on how you want it to sound.
My experience says thath I want the cut to sound more percussive than like a note – you don’t want it to sound like a pitch. I began playing flute by thinking of them as grace notes, because coming from a classical background, that was the only thing I knew that correlated. (when you are a hammer…) Thinking of it as an articulation has helped me a lot to improve my style. That took me a lot of practice, but be patient – it will come, and when it does, it’ll be so cool, and so easy, you’ll wonder why it was so hard at first. Some cuts come more easily for me than others. Also, in my experience, if I give kind of huff of air to the note after the cut, it sounds really neat. BUT – I don’t know if that is standard practice, and it might even be something that we are not supposed to do – hopefully some other people will chime in and let us know about that part…
PS – the B to A is the hardest one for me to get right. Any tips from anyone?
If you really want to cut there, it’s going to take a lot of practice, I think. But, going down in pitch, I generally find tapping much easier, and at the top end of the whistle, tapping is easier. Going down from B to A, I’d have to really, really want the chirp of a cut instead of the blip of a tap (or however you want to call the difference.)
If you find cuts difficult to execute with good timing, it may be that you are holding the whistle too tightly.
Prevent excess tension by trying to keep your fingers on the toneholes just firmly enough to get a good seal. If you have skinny fingers that leak, consider a) adjusting your hand position so as to use the flats of your fingers a little more b) using a different make of whistle with smaller tone holes, or c) use a small amount of hand lotion to help keep your fingers supple. Use your thumbs, pinkies, and lips to steady the whistle and support it. Do not use the other six fingers for any purpose other than to open or close tone holes in as relaxed a manner as possible.
Oh… I do cut there in practice scales of cuts… just in case I might want it in a tune sometime
or something.
Are you having a balance problem? On the flute, all the ornaments with most or all fingers
off were a problem for me until I started putting my RH-3 finger down for the highest
notes. The same can be true for some whistles, or some whistlers. Ie, I would now finger
it:
XOO OOX
OOO OOX
XXO OOX
I also find it crisper if the LH2 comes down a microsecond before LH1, but as you like.
You are right on in that last sentence. I can get the cut, and it’s not a balance problem, but crispness is a problem. That is a good tip – thank you so much!!!
Edited to add I just got home and tried it, and it works great! Now to practice it about 50 gazillion times in order to set it in my fingers. Thanks so much, Chris A.
We GHB players have to master a lot of grace note patterns and the technique I (and others) use is to go from every note to every other note in the scale using a particular gracing.
On GHB this 9 squared = 81 permutations, which seems a lot but with practice you can easily do 2/second so it only takes 40 seconds or so.
On the whistle you’ve got 18 notes tops which gives 324! Permutations that you could play in less than 2 minutes. Now a lot of these are going to be redundant so you could work out the ones you need and reduce the number considerably.
Work on the stuff you find hardest, devise your own exercises, practice slowly rhythmically and regularly.
If you do this I can guaranty you that you will get better.
I don’t know what GHB stands for. Anyway I gather you’re saying just find different types of grace notes you might use then practise them??
As for an earlier post, tapping just wouldn’t do. It certainly won’t give me the sound I’m after although I should use more taps in my playing as well. My aim is to be able to do them both fluently. I do find taps easier.
Edited to add: Pat, it’s not a case of holding the whistle / flute problems with me. I’m almost embarassed to say how long I’ve been playing as I’m asking pretty basic questions, but holding the instrument is definately not a problem.
