I’m learning a tune from a friend and it has triplets on the 2nd octave bell note (C in this case, on a Blackbird). I’m having difficulty playing them clearly. The fingering I’ve got that seems to work best is R1, R2, R3. Using any of the left hand fingers seems to want to make the note break.
Oh, and the note before and after the triplet is also the 2nd octave C.
Any suggestions?
I’m assuming you’re cutting OXX XXX, right? Have you tried covering T1? On my whistles, cuts usually work better with XXX XXX.
Or you could try tonguing it… Tik-i-tah
Best wishes.
Steve
Thanks guys!
I was already using XXX XXX for the cuts. I found that on my conical bore whistles it sounds pretty crisp – I just don’t have one in C.
I don’t object to tonguing, but I can’t double-tongue fast enough for a quarter note in a reel 
Something to work on, right? 
What I think you’re talking about is cranning.
The old-school whistlers, at least the guys I heard back in the 70s when I was learning, didn’t do crans on Bottom D or Middle D either one. (In Irish music it’s usual practice to speak of notes as if a D instrument is being played, regardless of what pitch instrument is actually being played at the moment. This is done on uilleann pipes, flute, and whistle.)
I would have to hear the tune in question, or the passage in question, but the old-timers would find another way to express it, rather than doing a triplet on the same note the way a fiddler or tenor banjo would do. Ditto for the box, they would find another way to express it, rather than hammer out three D’s in a row.
Traditionally uilleann pipers would cran Bottom D and sometime Low E, but for Middle D (called Back D on the pipes due to the thumbhole) they would, like whistle and flute and box players, find a melodic solution for passages in which a fiddle or tenor banjo was played a triplet of repeated Middle D’s. What they would do (and mostly still do) depends on the context, the shape of the melody at that point, and what the function of the triplet is.
Then, on the pipes, probably in the 1960s or around early 1970s, Finbar Furey made famous a stuttering triplet on Back D done by rapidly swiping the thumb back and forth over the hole. Paddy Keenan began doing it, as far as I can tell, around the same time. I believe that Donald MacLeod, the famous Highland piper and composer and arranger, was doing it earlier, by the 1950s at least, and composed at least one tune with these thumb triplets incorporated into it. This technique has since become, on both Highland and uilleann pipes, SOP more or less.
The bottom line is that there is no need for crans to be done on the whistle or flute. They’re a technique borrowed from the pipes fairly recently (credit usually given to Matt Molloy).
The advantage is that on the whistle and flute the exact pipers’ cran for Bottom D works equally well on Middle D (unlike on the pipes).
With cranning, the “rules” (traditional norms) say that the fingers used for the cuts are the tophand ring finger, and the index and middle fingers of the bottom hand. Just what sequence these cuts are in varies from piper to piper, but the “rule” is that no one finger should be used twice in a row. Some traditional sequences are
F# G A
G F# A (Willie Clancy’s)
A F# G
and any other.
Then there’s a longer cran with four cuts such as
G F# G A
and so forth.
When executed correctly these have a wonderful bubbling sound.
On whistle you can play Middle D either closed or open depending on your whim or how you prefer it to sound.
I’m not a fan of triple-tonguing on the whistle or Irish flute. If I’m going to borrow points of technique from another instrument I’d rather it be a traditional Irish instrument like the pipes rather than an orchestral or jazz instrument like the Boehm flute.
Thanks Richard. I guess I’m trying to do either of these:
G F# A (Willie Clancy’s)
A F# G
Here’s the tune (on D whistle). It’s a reel so it goes about twice as fast as I have it at this point:
https://soundcloud.com/piperbob/two-spoon-nets-in-the-loft
It’s called Da Thàbh Air an Fharaodh (Two Spoon Nets in the Loft) . As far as I can tell from Google, it’s pretty much only played by Harpers. But it fits whistle really well, aside from the pesky D triplets.
When performed as puirt a beul by Julie Fowlis, this reel moves along at a gallop. Cranns look like the way to go. I suppose after you master this one, you’ll have to compose another reel to go with it title The Compleat Angler.
Apologies to Izaak Walton!
Bob
I just now listened to that recording and I can’t tell what is going on, actually. It doesn’t sound idiomatic to me, a matter of ornamentation obscuring the melody.
I would have to see the sheet music or hear it played by an experienced Irish musician.
Harp players traditionally wouldn’t be playing reels, and wouldn’t be doing triplets. Of course there’s all sorts of cross-influences going on in the music nowadays.
Thing is about Irish wind instruments (flute, whistle, pipes) there’s virtually no music actually arranged for the instrument, so the player has to become his own arranger. Each instrument has its own style, its own melodic shapes etc, and a whistle/flute player wouldn’t play a tune learned from a fiddler, a box player, a banjo player, etc precisely the way the person played it on their instrument. The player of each sort of Irish instrument would automatically transform the tune to match the traditional way tunes are played on their particular instrument.
For example let’s say we have a box player, a fiddler, a piper (uilleann), a fluter, each with a digital recorder, and we have each one of them, one at a time, play a tune for the others to learn. Then you send each of these people off to a separate room to learn the tunes off their recordings. The boxplayer will make all the tunes sound like box tunes; the fiddler will make all the tunes sound like fiddle tunes, and so forth. Each player will transform/arrange the tunes to suit their instrument. Yet when they all play together it will sound like a fairly tight unison.
This is a longwinded way of explaining why your statement that the tune Da Thàbh Air an Fharaodh “has pesky triplets” doesn’t make sense to a traditional player. No tune “has” triplets; however a player can choose to put them in any tune whatsoever, if such is part of the traditional style of his instrument. Players of instruments that traditionally use triplets consisting of the same note repeated three times will put them ANY tune they learn from ANY source; players of instruments which do not use such triplets (like whistle or flute) will not put them in.
BTW I just searched The Session (which has tens of thousands of traditional tunes in its database) for your tune there, under both the Irish and the English title, and got no results. I assume the tune is either 1) a traditional tune normally called by a different name or 2) a newly composed tune.
We are approaching it more from the Scottish tradition (which is why I posted in the Whistle sub-forum and not the Irish Music sub-forum).
Harp in particular seems to have a lot of cross politicization, especially with the collaboration of Gráinne Hambly and William Jackson. Speaking of which, here’s a clip of from one of their CDs:
http://www.harpagency.com/Audio-Clips/twospoon.mp3
Somewhere I found a recent dissertation on the history of Harp in the Irish tradition. It is really interesting, and talks about how new the modern harp is and how quickly the performance standards are changing, including playing reels and jigs up to speed. Unfortunately I can’t remember enough details to google it up.
We are approaching it more from the Scottish tradition
As well you may. The tune doesn’t strike me as anything Irish at all and doesn’t have the feel (or structure) of an (Irish) reel.
The notes on the Grainne Hambly & William Jackson recording confirm this:
We learned the first tune from the puirt à beul (‘mouth music’) singing of Mairi MacInnes. It originally came from the piping tradition of South Uist> .
Wow… so we have an originally Highland Pipe tune transmitted through mouth-music and then arranged by neo-harpers, and somebody trying to learn the harp arrangement on whistle!
That’s a bit too removed from anything traditional for me.
I’d have to hear a recording of the original played on pipes, or a recording of a Gaelic speaker doing the mouth-music version, to get a sense of how to play it on whistle. Harp technique is so different from piping technique that it throws a veil over whatever the tune originally sounded like, in my opinion.
What is a “neo-harper”? Gráinne Hambly has pretty solid “trad” credentials.
I’m not sure why it matters what path the tune took to get to where it is – my goal is to play the tune /with/ the harper. It’s a good tune and I like it. I just need to decide how to approach the triplets.
And since when is learning tunes by ear not traditional?
The thing is, every different instrument is going to restructure the tune to suit what it does. So the chain of transmission is important, because the tune mutates at every step.
Learning a tune that was originally a wind instrument tune which has been transmitted from the wind instrument to a singer and then from a singer to a harper is fine, as regards the melody itself, though the actual melody notes probably have changed a bit at each stage.
But trying to copy specific points of ornamentation in this way just isn’t how the process of aural transmission has ever worked.
The singer has changed all the pipe ornamentation to things that the voice is capable of doing and/or is idiomatic to the voice; then all or part of the tune’s ornamentation was changed again when these harpers learned the tune from the singer, the harpers changing everything to things that harps are capable of doing and/or things which are idiomatic to harping.
Any traditional whistle player would take the gist of the tune and once again change all the ornamentation to what is idiomatic to the whistle, not try to invent ways of making a whistle parrot harping.
In Irish Traditional Music each instrument has its own style, its own idiom, and tunes learned from whatever source are altered by the traditional player so that they sound idiomatic on the instrument. That’s the only point I’m making.
Yes I could listen the harp interpretation of the voice interpretation of the Highland pipe tune and automatically come up with a whistle-idiomatic version, but I’m not interested in things removed that far from the source, and I’m not interested in playing Highland pipe tunes on the whistle… that’s what Highland pipes are for! I’ve heard so many Irish traditional players play, on whistle or uilleann pipes, awful versions of popular Highland pipe tunes I wonder why they bother. Likewise the modern Highland Pipe Band repertoire is full of horrible hacked-to-bits versions of Irish traditional tunes, tunes which don’t fit onto the gamut of the Highland pipes at all. Why bother, when there is so much great Highland pipe music that rarely gets played?
Taking the long view, it’s true that this sort of idiom-switching has always gone on. But if I hear one more Highland piper chop The Gold Ring to pieces I’ll scream (inside).
PS about ‘neo-harpers’ technically speaking all modern “Irish harpers” are neo-harpers because the chain of transmission of the traditional performance practices was broken. It’s a revival, not a tradition, strictly speaking.
So taking this particular case, if you were going to play it with someone playing it on harp exactly as the recording, do you have any advice for how to approach that particular spot where he plays the triplets on the C?