Just a quick question (or three) …
Do you add ornamentation from the beginning when learning a tune, or do you get the speed and feel of a tune up first and then add it?
Or is it a bit of both?
What, in your opinion, is best for a beginner, to get the speed playing unornamented tunes and then work on ornamentation, or to work on ornamentation and then get the speed up?
TooTs
Just a quick answer (or three)
If I am learning by ear, then the ornamentation has to be dealt with even if not fully implemented. Not being blessed with a Celtic upbringing, many of the tunes I attempt are not familiar enough that I can unravel the ornamentation to hear the simple melody.
If I am learning by a combination of ear and sheet music, I try to stick closer to the written because I can barely read music. Let’s see… Every Good Boy Do WHAT? If I can get a decent sounding melody going, the simpler the better until things begin to gel.
The simple answer is to do what works for you. The technical aspects of ornametation are way too complicated and cerebral for me to grasp. The first thought of finger order in a roll, cut, cran, etc will bring most any tune to a grinding, chaotic halt as the little guys trip all over themselves.
So, I guess I do both, working back and forth between the two. After that, I let my fingers decide what moves them. And never expecting to reach full jig velocity of some 6 million beats per minute, I have to make some concessions to genetically slow muscle response and Arthur I. Tiss.
If I was going to give advice on what worked for me…
Get the tune down first in your head. There will come a time when your fingers and ability will allow you to play at whatever speed you like.
Then work on the finger speed. I dont read sheet or use slowdown software. I have always played along with music. Early on I had a heckuva time keeping up or playing a tune accurately, but my fingers got used to the movement
Practice ornamentation but use it sparingly while you are learning. I made plenty of fingering mistakes that sound like ornamentation, and vice-versa.
Try playing any familiar songs you know by picking out the notes on the whistle. This is great for getting familiar with the scalings on the whistle, and learning half-holing.
Get totally familiar with the breathing requirements of your whistle particularly the upper register. Each of them is unique.
It depends on how much of a beginner we’re talking of, assuming you’ have the twinkletwinkle stages behind you, it’s time to move on to simple marches (assuming we’re talking about irish music and why would you want to know about ornamentation if we’re not) like the Eagle’s Whistle, Slieve Aughty etc and introduce a few cuts there to articulate the tune, move on to a few polkas there, a few cuts here and there, then on to dance music, jigs, a hornpipe or two and reels then, using cuts, taps and rolls. That’s perfectly do-able if you take it handy and play slowly at first to get everything in properly.
If you enjoy the piece, if you love the piece, the ornmamentation will come up of its own accord as you play the tune over and over.
Then when the song is second nature and ornamentation spontaneous, try “abstracting” the mode of the piece - not just the scalar mode but some significant line in the melody that sums up the feeling of it. Practise this over and over also. This will help you to control the ornamentation and replicate it as and when you wish and be a springboard for new ornamentations.
Thanks for comments.
I’m doing reasonably well with some jigs and reels, but without any real ornamentation. I’ve still not got the fluency and speed to get a good feel going with them though.
I’m mainly thinking i need to get the speed and feel sorted out before i start confusing the whole thing with ornaments and i was just wondering what approach the more experienced players who’ve gone through the process would recommend.
As i said, put it in, it’s an integral part of the music and it will only be harder to put in when you’re used to playing without it.
As an example: my 11 year old son decided last year he wanted to go to whsilte classes. i told him he could if he put in the work and was able to play a tune or two at the grading of the classes. Over the summer he taught himself by ear Jimmy Ward’s jig. He was placed in an intermediate group and started immediately learning rolls, he has his legacy Jig, a few hornpipes, Ships are Sailing and is at the minute practising the Galway Rambler, slowly first but with all the bits. All local kids that go to same whistle teacher turn out lovely players so she must be doing something right.
I want to go on record as disagreeing (har-rumph, har-rumph).
I have too many renditions of tunes with too many variations of ornamentation and have come to realize that I want to be flexible in adding ornamentation as needed to a basic tune. I wouldnt say it is harder, but part of the journey.
I didn’t you should go over the top with it but playing a reel like Ships are Sailing there are a few obvious rolls, you put them in plus the appropriate cuts etc to keep the tune going and there you have your basic tune you can build on.
I have a clip from my son’s whistle class, the way he got that tune from the teacher, slow first phrase by phrase and at speed after, if you want it I’ll e-mail it
I’m thinking that ‘ornamentation’ isn’t a great word for the things that aren’t necessarily the melody. For example, when a tune does does something like GGG GAB you have to do something betwixt the G’s. So even if I’m hearing someone play it for me note for note, or reading it from the page – G G G G A B… I tend to cut and tap between them. Its either that or tonguing, and my triple-tonguing isn’t very good.
When I have a tune down well enough that I want to do something else, it turns out being variations, with their own resident “crunchy bits”*. For example: 3G GAB, or 2GD GAB, or GF#G GAB (thinking about it, I rarely do anything different with that GAB part…hmmmm). As I have no ‘intrinsic’ feel for variation, I don’t do them often, or spontaneously. I have to practice them and get comfortable changing from ‘straight melody’ to variation and back without fumbling.
So my answer is that you learn the tune with the requisite non-melody bits (call them ornamentation if you’d like) then add your variations when you’re ready.
Tyg
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You are assuming that ornamentation is NECESSARY! It ain’t, in fact I recall some of my misspent youth listening to Irish Whistle / Flute players who rarely bothered. It sounds impressive but can be a pain in the leg to dance through. Keep the rhythm solid and keep the tunes simple.
OC I don’t need to remind myself if playing Irtrad …ahem it is STILL dance music.
I’m with Peter. I was taught with ornamentation from the beginning (once i was past the twinkle twinkle stage) and found it harder to add stuff to already-learned tunes than to learn from the beginning. Just start slow and with simple tunes.
But, once you get better at playing in general, it will be easier to go back and ornament tunes differently if desired, because your tool box of skills will be bigger and more accessible.
Knowing where to put in the ornamentation assumes you have a feel for the phrasing of the tune. If you’re a real beginner, I’d learn the movement/phrasing of the tune before stirring in the extra notes. Also ask yourself if your ornamentation is interrupting the rhythm/flow of the tune. Get a good handle on that and the grace notes will fall into the right places more readily. If you can hear the flow of the tune beyond the basic counting, then it’s more instinctive where to put the extra stuff and you may as well from the start.
Tony
I agree with the last handful of responses. Melody and rhythm is the only important thing. Ornamentation is just style. I’ll take an accurate tune with no ornaments ANY DAY over a sloppy ornamented tune.
Learn the basic melody. Drill it into your head. Don’t even TOUCH ornaments until you can play the basic melody without having to think about it.
Coming from blues and jazz I had the opposite experience. I wouldn’t call it a problem because I’ve been listening to Scottish and Irish music most of my life so I wasn’t tempted to jazz it up. But I did have to resist variation until I felt I had a clear picture of what the generally acceptable bounds are.
One helpful thing I’ve found is that, if you learn more than one setting, you can pick the basic one you are playing and move between phrases that you’ve learnt from different settings. This is now fairly easy for me because I often learn the same tune on concertina and whistle and I find the concertina-friendly setting won’t be quite the same as the whistle one. So, for variety, I’ll throw in phrses from another version where they fit, knowing I’m not straying too far.
The settings don’t have to come from different instruments of course. It just suits my overall learning if they do. Also, learning different settings gets you thinking about what you want to do with the tune. Some settings of a tune might be pentatonic, others will throw in the missing notes. Playing both will make you ask which is more effective.
Anyone else using the "if I hit the wrong hole I can roll, cran, swoop or trill off onto the right one?
Turlough O’Carolan used it all the time on the harp, his poor fingers looked as if they had been breadcrumbed. His deaf brother, the Priest feller from above at the bus station pub, used to make lotion for him, TC didn’t realise it was just tartare sauce he stole from the chipshop.
Ahem - back in me box. :roll:
Guilty!
I have found that as I try playing slower, some of my high-speed ornamentation is revealed as cover for inaccuracy. So I’m going to take some of this advice and slow way down (at least when I can direct the tempo). Not leave the ornaments out, but not let them walk all over the tune. It’s just that they’re so much Fun! 
Jennie
All the time (with the exception of “cran”, which I can’t do except by accident anyway).
Aren’t grace notes brilliant!
Seems to me that there are ornaments and ornaments. (Profound, eh?)
Cut and taps are articulation, and I think they have to be learned from the get-go. Tonguing everything and then “adding in” cut and taps just doesn’t seem right. And that means that which notes ought to be cut or taped and which ought not to be is something to learn from the beginning, too.
Rolls is a slightly different matter, many tunes, and particularly jigs, are prefectly fine without them and can be learned that way. But if you have a reel and a figure like B~G3 d~G3 I think you have to either put in the roll from the start or work around it properly, for example BGDG dGBG. Going BGGG dGGG and tonguing the Gs isn’t quite the thing, nor is BG3 dG3.
About tonguing the rolls: That’s not such a exercise for beginners in my mind. And Micho Russell had something Bill Ochs calls “Micho Rolls,” in which he would combine a cut and a tongued note to form a roll: BG{B}G.G dG{B}G.G… Doesn’t sound half bad, try it.
Slides can wait, as can triplets, but not very long.
I’ve changed my mind on this issue a bit, btw, and meeting the whistle teacher Peter refers to and hearing her clip for the youngsters was a big part of it.
This is exactly how my teacher teaches. It makes sense to me.