I’ve been playing the whistle for about a month now with my previous experience in instruments being 30 years ago when I was first chair clarinet. I’m rather pleased with my progress with the whistle and you can actually tell I’m playing a tune and I’ve adapted to the different types of music well enough. I still make plenty of mistakes and I certainly don’t know any tunes completely by memory but I’ve concentrated on tone and rhythm.
So here are my questions regarding ornamentation:
When is a good time to start adding ornamentation? I’m sure everyone has a different method but should I really learn a tune and then add ornamentation? Learn as I go? Just wait?
Should I just keep playing tunes and concentrate more on speed?
Do you have a favorite type of ornamentation or do you use several? I’m asking because my brain splits and synapses completely block when I try to practice short or long rolls Taps and cuts individually are easier to deal with but to combine them…arrrghhh. Grace notes though are much simpler for my brain but that may just be the clarinet in me.
Am I just rushing things? I think my desire to learn and the tune I hear in my head are waaaay ahead of my abilities
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! And please excuse any technical whistle mistakes!
Meanwhile spend some time practicing, alone, outside of tunes, rolls and/or other ornaments you
have trouble with. Like ten or fifteen minutes at a go, rolls up and down the scale. Not a bad
idea to also practice in this way the ornaments you can already do pretty well.
One month is not very long. This stuff will fall in place with time.
I think you’ve kind of answered your own question. Start with cuts–they are the most used ornament. Add them when you feel like it when learning/playing tunes. Remember they aren’t grace notes, i.e. the cut occurs on the beat not before the beat like a grace note. After that (or concurrently), work on taps–again they are on the beat. Your body/brain is telling you it’s too soon to work on rolls; those can wait. Once your more adept at cuts and taps, rolls will come to you a lot easier. DON’T work on grace notes unless you’re playing classical/modern band music; they have no place in Irish traditional music.
Your ultimate goal is to internalize both the ornamentation technique, and also the musical style, so that the ornaments come out more or less spontaneously.
In some cases, ornaments aren’t really ornaments, but structural elements, like rolls in some tunes. And obviously you need something to separate repeated notes.
But the rest you add for emphasis and for phrasing, and eventually they’ll just naturally end up coming out of your fingers. When I learn a new tune from my friend who plays harp, for instance, I’ll be adding ornaments as I’m playing back the phrases.
My favorite whistle ornament at the moment comes from bagpipes (e doubling in GHB speak).
xoo ooo – note (could be a different note but works best from higher notes)
ooo ooo – cut
xxo ooo – strike
xoo ooo – cut
xxo ooo – note
If you’re having difficulty with rolls, leave this alone – it has to be crazy fast to work – just a blip of a sound before the note.
Keep at it. It takes a lot of time to build the muscle memory to do things like rolls.
Ok, just got back from practicing some tunes I can play decently and have added/practiced with either a cut or hit (aka tap or strike right?). I use cuts or hits in between two repeating notes instead of tonguing. That finally clicked and it feels natural and sounds nice. I’ve made progress and feel warm and fuzzy hehe.
When I mentioned grace note, I was using a term I got from McCullough’s pamphlet from his DVD…Like B (ab)A…playing (ab) quickly in between the B and A. Maybe there is another term for it? This ornamentation is one I can understand.
So far, I like a lot of the hornpipes because of the rhythm and when you mess up, it’s easy to get back into it Cronin’s, Off to California…good stuff.
Everyone more or less confirmed what I had thought and will stick with the easy stuff and practice the rolls and other ornamentation once I’m more comfortable.
It’s funny, I hear some people here who have had clips and they apologize for the bad playing but it still sounds nice to me.
Grace note is a perfectly common and well used term in Irish music circles. There’s just not a lot of standardisation of terminology. For example, I have yet to hear anyone in Ireland use ‘strike’ as a term.
Common practice is to learn a few songs, anything from Twinkle Twinkle upward, a few marches, polkas and introduce cuts at that point, move on to jigs, reels and hornpipes and introduce some rolls there, as soon as you start tackling those tunes.
As far as I know, Loretto Reid uses the term strike, and she is from Sligo… that said, I also have only heard of her using the term and no one else. Tap is definitely the most common!
Grace note may be perfectly common, but it’s useful I think for a former classical player to be aware that it does have different meanings or connotation in irish music!
I may well be mistaken, but my understanding is that grace notes (whether acciaccaturas or appoggiaturas, and also more complex forms) are usually played on the beat, not before it, because they introduce and resolve a dissonance in the melody.
Basically though, you can use ornamentation whenever you feel like and make it your own Funny, I can read the music but improvising and embellishing takes some rewiring of the brain
From what I could tell and how I understood it, the cut or tap is more a break in airflow and barely noticeable while a grace note is louder and meant to be heard? Is that…correct or partially correct?
Or maybe how you play the cut or hit determines your interpretation and anything goes?
I think I may be less prescriptive about this than some around here. But I’d make the following points:
Cuts and taps are kind of like breaks in the note, but I wouldn’t say they’re breaks in the airflow. And they’re definitely noticeable. They’re meant to be heard. It’s the pitch of the ‘break’ formed by the cut or tap that is less noticeable. The break itself gives a sort of rhythm to things, when you get the hang of it.
[BTW I’m almost making up jargon as I go there. Nobody uses the word “break” as a name for these things normally. Well, not as far as I know, anyway. Just trying to be explanatory. ]
In classical music, a gracenote takes time away from the note that follows it – the only way that can happen is if it starts on the beat. As you say, it creates and resolves a dissonance.
I’ve spent a bit of time trying to understand the details of the timing of embellishments in Scottish pipe music, and it’s not easy to say exactly what happens. I suspect some of the same thing happens in ITM. If you really analyze what’s going on you’ll probably find that the exact placement of different embellishments varies by the performer, and also by the tune. Sometimes a bit of a delay for musical effect. Sometimes a substantial change from what “theory” would predict.
We all understand that intuitively though – it’s the difference between what generic music notation software produces when it plays back a score and what a musician produces.
Not that it matters, but if you google [ tin whistle ornament strike ] you find that a lot of people use the term, including Grey Larsen.
Not that it matters, but if you google [ tin whistle ornament strike ] you find that a lot of people use the term, including Grey Larsen.
I know there are a lot of people using that term. The point I made was that terminology isn’t standard and that’s why I said:
There’s just not a lot of standardisation of terminology. For example, I have yet to hear anyone in Ireland use ‘strike’ as a term.
Grey Larsen has introduced a few terms and approaches of his own, some of it quite alien to the commonly used terminology as I know it Again, the point is: there’s no universally agreed standard terminology. I can perfectly understand ‘strike’ but none of the players I interact with in real life uses the term and I wouldn’t actively use it either. Along the same lines the use of ‘grace note’ is something I have been familiar with in the context of Irish music well over thirty years without ever confusing what it describes with anything from the classical music world.
I also know people who learned forty years ago saying that they never used ‘cut’ or ‘grace’ but knew those as ‘birls’ and ‘roll’ wasn’t a term used by anyone they knew at the time.
Wikipedia is not gospel, but this article gives a very good description of the normal practice surrounding both appogiaturas and acciacaturas in classical music.
As I say, it depends. Most definitely not always on the beat.
But that doesn’t have much to do with trad. Just trying to preserve at least a degree of accuracy.
We seem to be overlooking the essential (usual) difference between “classical” (i.e. baroque usually) ornamentation and “irish” ornamentation. Classic (just going with the easiest term to use, no music period implied) ornamentation is almost always made up of notes where the pitch of each note is intended to be heard. Most “Irish” ornamentation is made up of notes played so rapidly that you hear a “pop” or a “click” or some such thing and not really the note itself. Some tutorial materials will say (or at least imply) that if you can hear the pitch of a cut or tap (or strike if you will) you probably played it too slowly. That is an important distinction and a basic difference between the sound of traditional players (and those who aspire to that) and “classical” players.
For learning, take a good jig with repeated notes and use cuts or taps (if possible) each time a note is repeated. The first, third, and fourth sections of “Lark in the Morning” are ideal for this. Lot of different pitches to cut or strike and ample opportunity to decide which fingers you are going to use to make the ornament and exercise them. I’m no expert on playing “Irish” ornamentation, but I have found that working Lark in the Morning has made it easy for me to transfer that skill to other tunes, and as provided a good foundation for long and short rolls too.
Taps and cuts individually are easier to deal with but to combine them…arrrghhh. Grace notes though are much simpler for my brain but that may just be the clarinet in me.
Funny, I can read the music but improvising and embellishing takes some rewiring of the brain