Is there a standard strategy for playing tunes (on a D flute or whistle) that have notes lower than low D? For example, there is a lovely slow jig on Mary Rafferty’s “Hand Me Downs” (really beautiful album, by the way) called Martin Mulvihill’s that goes down to C# in the A part of the tune.
It seems to be there are a few options for this tune, none of which sound ideal to my ear, but I’m interested in your thoughts. First, simply skip the missing note or play the low D twice instead of moving up from C# to D. (The first way requires changing the rhythm to make it sound okay; the second would definitely clash with someone playing the melody with the C#.) Second, play the missing note (C#) one octave up but then jump back down to play the low D. (This sounds a bit awkward since it requires a jump up and then jump back down.) Third, jump up to the C# one octave up and then play following D up there as well. (This ways loses something lovely about the melody to my ear.)
Any thoughts about this specific tune or more general strategies for this sort of issue would be appreciated.
P.S. I didn’t know what to search for to see if this has been discussed before; my apologies if it has, and any links to those discussions would be appreciated.
The solutions are pretty standard: You can either alter the phrase so no note below D is needed or you can pick a suitable place as you approach the phrase whereat you jump up an octave so the note below D can be played, and then drop back down again.
One of those two will work and are actually the only possibilities there are to the best of my knowledge.
Playing D instead of C# will probably not help much at all. As a fluter, you have to miss some notes out to breathe, so that’s a real option, though it comes a bit early in the phrase.
My own suggestion would be to look for another note that harmonises with C# and also “leads” to D. So you could play E i.o. C#. That gives you two Es, which sounds, I think, quite satisfactory but does lose some of the charm of the tune. You could try A - if you were harmonizing the tune (let’s not, really, but the ideas can help) you might well have an A major at that point, ready to resolve onto the D, so the most obvious notes to try would be A, C# (where the problem is) and E. I haven’t tried it, but I can imagine A might be more interesting than E.
The octave jump is indeed another good option, but to maintain flow I think you are right when you say you’d want to play more than just that single C# an octave up - at least the following D, but perhaps a bit more before or after the C#, or both. The problem here is that you then lose the D > D’ jump which is a bright spot of the tune.
So try E or A - let us know which solution you most like in the end!
In that particular tune, I think I’d do what some of the old guys used to do: jump up the ocatve just for the C#. Done right, lightly, it can even sound like it’s not up the octave. Mind you, it’s not a problem for me, 'cos I have a C foot, but the same sort of thing applies in Christie Barry’s No 2, the one that starts DEG EDB, | DEG B3 . In that one, I just jump up the octave for the low B, which seems to be the standard solution for that jig.
I thought about that approach, pandscarr, but the octave jump D to d is such a feature of that tune, and if you do what you suggest you end up, right at the start of the tune, with a leap up to d’ (i.e. third octave d) which I think might be a bit intrusive right there at the start of the tune.
I’m with lingpupa, and pandscarr. To lingpupa’s E and A substitutes I’d add F# as my first choice actually for the first C#, and substitute A or E for the second C#.
Ben’s solution works better with Christie Barry’s #2 than here. In CB2 the D-B leap is a pleasant Major 6th jump (and is what I play). But here, C# is the leading tone. Substituting c# hides that and instead makes a wide Major 7th which sounds odd and a bit discordant to me. Followed immediately by the D-d octave leap it also gives a strange ping-pong effect to my ear.
Mind, I’m thinking of a solo context. In a group context, I think any of the solutions here could sound fine.
Musically, I totally agree, Mr Guru Sir. And I accept it’s different from the nice major sixth. Still, it’s surprising how often in a session context you hear people doing those wide jumps, even if they’re major sevenths. I think you can hide some of the harshness of it by applying some good ol’ octave ambiguity. On flute anyway. Not so easy on whistle.
[edited to add:] … oh, and I was thinking more of a session context than solo. If I was thinking solo, I might have to judiciously kind of re-write that bit, IOW, have a different set of 3 notes (or more) that fitted, rather than taking the whole thing up an octave or substituting for just one note.
To your general query, the answer is, search on “octave folding” - you should find plenty, including some fairly recent advice in a thread of DrPhill’s.
As for your current specific instance, here are my thoughts/some possibilities:
One can, of course, mix and match between the various suggestions in the different lines, varying one’s choices through the repeats and multiple times through the tune.
My own initial preference, given I’m not familiar with the tune hitherto… would probably to be to keep the D octave jumps and either jump just the low C#s or play As instead of them to preserve the distinctive wide rocking patterns as much as possible… Or just play it on (a proper) flute, not whistle, and use the low C#! (and a pox on g’darn short-foot keyless nonsense half-way house half-baked short-foot keyless semi-flutes… )
I usually just play the offending note an octave up, although for this particular tune that’s probably not the best approach. In order to get that “octave ambiguity” to which others have alluded, I was taught to imagine (visualize?) that you’re playing the note in its correct octave. For a typical DBD or EAE kind of phrase, it works pretty well (unless I’m imagining that it sounds good).
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