I have been playing music on stringed instruments for years, but am very new to the flute. I am trying to learn my first O’Carolan tune and am having a hard time with a part of it. I was wondering if some of you might have some ideas to share as to how to approach this phrase on the flute.
Play it as written. Octave jump or pedal-tone patterns like that occur a good bit in Irish music, and as you say they’re difficult but not impossible on the flute. Learning how to play them is a great exercise in embouchure development, well worth the time it takes. And it will take some time.
I say keep it the way it is. It’s a good passage to practice the jumps and is probably in the most favorable part of the flute to do so. Almost any other passage with the pedal note being the A, G, F# etc. would be much tougher, methinks. On the other hand, it’s good to have variations, though, as with all tunes, so try other things after nailing the original.
In this case, though, there is no “original” available. You can pick and choose among the roughly 2,647 versions of O’Carolan’s Draught, probably none of which is exactly how O’Carolan himself composed it.
Doing the octave jumps is indeed good practice, just be sure it’s also good music.
Lots of good suggestions. As John mentioned, last night I worked on the octave jumps and now can do that pretty well, but I like Brad’s way of playing the tune better. I think it sounds more interesting.
MTGuru’w way of breaking it down to the basics and showing many variations based on that was helpful as well, and I like some of his interesting variations too.
Not if you can do it without making it sound like you are glottal-stopping. Lots of good flute players put glottal stops in places you’d never guess by listening to them.
And I agree with Brad in that some different variation of what was written here might make better music of the tune. I was just looking at the abc without knowing which tune it was, because the name wasn’t put on it. Could be I don’t even play it myself. Which one is it?
Thanks. The reason I asked was that I also came to flute from mandolin and that was one of several tunes I already knew where I had problems with the pedal notes (others included the Harvest Home). Glottal stop was a ‘quick fix’ whilst I was probably still blowing the second octave too hard. Coming to try it now after your suggestion above I realised that not using the stop forces work on the embouchure and is a bit more ‘delicate’.
