Why Do We Find Rolls Difficult?

Whistle
1

Oh, you don’t find rolls difficult. Well, Sunshine, you can just stop reading right now unless you’re looking for yet another batch of reasons to laugh at the rest of us.

Yes, I know there’s another thread on rolls at the moment, and a grand thread it is too. But I have a very specific question to ask and a bit of a theory to offer. I’d like to focus discussion just on this issue. I did get the idea reflecting on Bloomy’s thread I must say. But the question has exercised me for a long time. I have a theory about why they are difficult. I don’t have a view about how to make them less difficult. But, if my theory is on the right track, maybe someone will come up with a proposal that works. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Even those of us with a lot of experience employing ornamentation in other styles of music, and who don’t have a lot of trouble with other Irish ornaments, seems to find rolls especially difficult to execute well. When you think about them, they shouldn’t be especially difficult. But they are. Here’s my diagnosis.

Here are three bits of advice which seem to me to be good advice, if only we could put them all together in the right way.

  1. Practice slowly.
  2. Employ the dah, blah blah approach.
  3. Make sure the cuts and taps are rhythmic blips rather than fully articulated notes.
    Add to this another factor which makes rolls hard to learn: they are often hard to hear properly on records played at full speed so slow down technology is a good learning aid.

Actually, not everyone does advise practising slowly. Cathal McConnell advises exactly the opposite. Before you try rolls practice trilling between the rolled note and tapped note until you get it up to full (blippy) speed. Until you can do this, don’t even think of trying rolls. When you can do this properly, ie fast enough, insert cuts in place of some taps, again at full speed.

OK, first, how can we understand Cathal’s advice in the context of the other points? I don’t think it’s too hard to see what he is getting at. Until you can play fast enough to make cuts and taps sound like blips you might as well not bother. OK, so once we can do that, we still have a problem. Dah blah blah is not anything like a very fast trill. Only the cut and tap parts are.

OK, armed with enough speed for blips but desiring to use that skill in just the right dah blah blah way, do we now just practice slowly? Well, this might work but it won’t work in the way that slow practice usually works. Let me explain. Suppose you use slow-down technology to hear fast passages distinctly in a piece of music. Typically, once you have the notes, you start practicing at a comfortable speed and then just gradually speed up the CD or the metronome as you improve. So this will work with rolls, right?

Wrong. It won’t work with rolls. At full speed a roll sounds like this: note, blip, note, blip, note. Slowed down it sounds like this: Nooote, bliip, nooote, bliip, nooote. Now try playing along with the CD at that pace getting the rhythm right. You can’t. At that pace, you won’t get a blip in cut and tap positions, you’ll get a shorter note. It will sound like this: nooote, cut note, nooote, tap note, nooote.

Right. Call in the Cathal McConnell skills and just blip anyway, even though you can’t quite play along with the slowed down record or a metronome any more. Now you get: nooote, blip, nooote, blip, nooote. OK practice that until you are ready to speed up.

You already have problems becasue what you’ve been practising isn’t rhythmically right anyway. Does speeding up fix this? In my opinion, it doesn’t. What you have to do is gradually decrease the time you take to play note bits whilst keeping the time you take to blip constant. This is not going to be easy to do well. Every time you increase the overall speed of the roll, the rhythm changes. Only when you get up to full speed are you playing something that really sounds like a roll.

I hope this makes sense. If I’m on the right track, is it any wonder that lots of us find rolls difficult? If I’m not on the right track, what have I got wrong? Maybe we can learn from that. Either way, given all these considerations, how should we practice rolls?

2

Australians should play rolls upside down, shouldn’t they?

3

I know I should have read on maybe but I can’t remember having any great difficulties learning rolls [not more than learning anything else and ofcourse you do need to put in the work] nor do I see any great problems with rolls in my piping students or the local young whistleplayers. I think probably the best approach is to learn them in context, as part of the music you are playing, where they make sense. It helps, maybe, to bear in mind that they should enhance the tune rather than be there as a technical challenge. They are means to an end and it helps if you understand what you are aiming for within the music, why you put them in at all.

4

Hi, Peter.

Perhaps you can offer more information about how you teach rolls or how the local young whistlers go about learning them.

Best wishes,
Jerry

5

I was thinking that question would come, Jerry, to be honest they come to me for piping lessons after having had a grounding on the whistle by the local whistle teacher. So soem of the hard work is done for me. I am not sure how to put it, they seem to come with an inherent understanding of hte music and the place of ornamentation. I have a young boy coming to me now, started on the pipes this summer and he has an amazing control, you show him what to do and he just does it, not a bother, but I am sure his strength is that he has the music in his head and knows what the ornaments are doing in these places. I really only need to show him things and coax him along a bit.
The general practice her is to show them how to do it and let them repeat it while teaching the tune.

In the context of knowing the music in relation to rolls I was also thinking about the local whistle teacher, she’s as fine a player a anybody on both fluite and whsitle and listening to her music there’s a sense there that she has the music quite naturally. Now, she always wanted to play the pipes but that was not really on for girls when she was young. For some years now I have been teaching her daughter who is doing really great so one that the mother herself decided to give it a shot. She came to me for a few lessons to get her started. now I was teaching her a particular tune, Jimmy Ward’s I think it was and she instinctively played a lovely roll in it, quite different from the usual roll, or the roll I would have thought there. I asked her so to do it again so I could see what she was doing. Instantly she grew nervous and asked was she doing it wrong? I re-assured her [for fecksake I wouldn’t have dared to assume she did anything wrong] she wasn’t but I wanted to see what she was doing. Anyway, whatever she did gave a beautiful lift to the phrase not your da blah blah, not something really learned or practiced but soemthing put in instinctively. It was really great to hear that . Ofcourse she later told me Willie Clancy had shown her a bunch of rolls when she was ten .

Now, I am not quite sure why I am telling you this all, probably to make the point rolls aren’t some formulaic thing you can drop into a tune at will [ofcourse you can do that but won’t your music sound formulaic then?].

Listening helps, there is quite a bit of variation in how rolls are actually played, in the actual set up of cuts and taps as well as the rhythm of the whole thing.

I know someone will come up now and say ‘we can do what we like so’. Well, no not quite that either but there’s room for interpretation in how they work.

For the nuts and bolts though, it’s listening and practicing. And I once more quote Jackie Daly ‘It’s Dark and Lonely Work’.

6

I think they might be harder if you have already played instruments for a long while in other styles and never confronted them, which is the case for many on this Forum. That’s how it was for me. Because they are unlike other ornaments, except perhaps some very early Baroque ones, like the vocal trillo (also called the “goat trill”) of Monteverdi and Florentine camerata days. I used to sing those but didn’t make the connection until recently. Get yerself a politically, I mean musically, correct Early Music rekerd of Early Italian Baroque vocal music and you will hear trillos, at cadences only, tho, to see the connection.

If you are a newcomer, you just learn it along the way as another skills, not a deviation from previous playing. I mean, if you have played lots of other instruments, you look at a diatonic whistle, learn the scale etc. Then you confront this anomaly that SEEMS very imprecise and weird at first. Almost like unlearning something.

Brendan Breathnach described a roll as being like a ball that bounces three times, with each successive bounce a little less high. An interesting metaphor, I thought. I reiterate that listening to rolls on fiddle, pipes and their triplet equivalents on banjo and accordions really cements the rhythmic concept of how Peter describes them enhancing the music. Just listening to whistlers wasn’t enough for me. When I think of Irish music, I hear fiddles doing the off-beat rolls in my head in fast reels as the most familiar sound…

7

I think the weekend has a very good point there, I have found it of immense benefit listening to other instuements, hearing how they approach certain corners of tunes can give real insights into the whole thing sticks together.

8

I don’t know that this has anything to do with anything, but I know that my problem with rolls has always been that right from the start they sounded so fast to me that I just knew I’d never be able to play them. I had a mental block against them (still do to some extent). They SOUND so complicated! I think I’ve really made it harder to play them than it ever had to be. I just kept thinking: “I have to fit 5 notes in the time for 1 and it has to have the correct rhythm??!?! NO WAY!”

Practicing rolls over and over, starting very slowly and gradually speeding up has been the only way I could ever have learned them.

Susan

9

I think Peter made a very good point about hearing (and playing) them in the context of the music.

Not that I’m that far advanced - I’m just starting to work seriously on ornamentation, but I hit a mental block on something even simpler: cuts. Not cuts on the same note - even I could handle those - but cuts between different notes as you move up or down the scale.

So I’d been working with Bill Och’s section on cuts, and playing ascending or descending scales with cuts between notes, but when I tried to play the first tune he gave for practice (“Tralee Gaol”) I just fell apart. I could play it easily without the cuts (for cripe’s sake - it’s a polka!) but when I added them I’d train-wreck after the first two or three measures. Didn’t even try to play this piece at last weekend’s get-together.

But I buckled down this week to work on it, and though I kept practicing scales (to get my fingers used to the idea) instead of playing the tune I just kept listening to this tune on the CD - set the player to repeat the track. For a while I listened to the music intently, but even when I was theoretically relaxing (on the computer, or reading a book) I kept it playing at a low background level (probably drove my wife & kids crazy). Then after several hours of this spread over several days, I just sat down and played it. Not perfectly - the rhythm was ragged and there were a couple of stumbles - but through to the end. And the ornaments didn’t seem forced - they just fit into the tune, and when I didn’t do one it seemed odd. No a big “Aha!” moment where the world changes but more of an “Oh, of course!” when things start to fall into place.

Still got a long ways to go, but for me the breakthrough was, as Peter said, seeing how the ornaments fit into the tune - not HOW to play them, but WHEN and WHY.

10

Five notes in the time of onehmm. Try think of playing in a jig say GFG, develop that into {A}GFG, then once you have that rather than play F as a full note just hit the hole with the lower finger. And there you have a long roll on G in a jig. [will I get Steve on my back now for getting people to play rolls in jigs? They actually do tht around here, sorry].
Once you have that going you can transpose the whole concept to othe notes, once you can do that you will be able to translate the roll to other rhtyhms, make them fit in reels etc. Just let it grow on you bit by bit. Also remember there used to be [and there still are ] a good few players who play quite nicely without using rolls much at all. But with impeccable phrasing adn solid rhtyhm. So go sort out that first.

11

The only way I can respond to this is to say that I took piano lessons for seven years, and my teacher instilled in me that the only way to learn a new piece of music was to do it one little bit at a time, slowly, untill you knew it well enough to bring it up to speed. Why should the whistle be any different?

~Larry

12

The difference was the point of my initial post. You can’t play a blip slowly and then bring it up to speed. A blip has to be played as such straight away.

What I’m hearing sounds to me like good advice. Just listen until you can hear how rolls work in the music and then practice until you can play what you hear. If you can be shown as well, so much the better. That’s how I’m playing and it works better than any formula. But reading Bloomy’s thread, I think I just figured out why.

I like Peter’s point that there are many different ways of playing rolls. Reading the books, you hear about half a dozen ornaments and get told how to play them. Listening to the music I hear hundreds of subtly different ornaments that bear some resemblance to what I’ve read about but seem to have something quite distinctive about them too. The only way to play like that is to immerse yourself in the music until you ‘feel’ appropriate things and can play what you feel. Blues was like that. So was jazz. That’s not to say that a bit of regimentation at the start might not be helpful. But that’s just to get started.

13

I suppose your theory might work for some people, but if I had tried to play rolls by simply listening to them played over and over at speed, I’d have given up in frustration. It was a very long time before I even realized the musicians I was listening to were actually playing notes. Had I tried to simply “blip away” I certainly wouldn’t have had a clue what I was doing and would never have done it correctly. I had to know what my fingers were supposed to be doing during each step of a roll in order for it to make any sense. It’s gradually coming together for me, but only because I understand the components of the ornament and the overall feel.

Susan

14

Quite possibly because were are talking about a different kind of music and a different kind of approach here. For a basic, mechanical approach, yes, you want to take things slowly but Wombat above made a very valid point that rolls are not really something you do very slowly. Learning the whistle, and as we are discussing rolls etc I automatically assume speaking about learning Irish music, you will need to get your basic framework solid, say the top-layers of playing solidly in time and apply a correct phrasing [these go hand in hand and are more important than anything else], once you have that you start applying rolls in appropriate places, and that will be at first in places where you can, maybe your G roll is good so you use these and develop on from there. Ornamentation is just another layer you apply to the music [like other embellishments like variation etc].

15

The only way I can respond to this is to say that I took piano lessons for seven years, and my teacher instilled in me that the only way to learn a new piece of music was to do it one little bit at a time, slowly, untill you knew it well enough to bring it up to speed. Why should the whistle be any different?

~Larry
Same technique applied when I was learning the Highland pipes, not only for new tunes, but especially for ornamentations. Worked for me at the time.

16

Yes, I think you will. :smiley:

Jens

PS: I do play the occasional roll in my jigs too. So shoot me. :wink:

17

I just started getting the hang of them last week, and while I can eek out a semi-decent roll on G (and occasionally F# & E), the one-handed rolls sound wretched. It’s much easier for me to coordinate the roll between two hands than on one.

The slow-and-steady ‘dah-blah-blah’ method worked on my G roll, so I figure the other ones will come up to speed eventually, it will just take more time. The main thing I’m trying to concentrate on now is releasing my instinctive death grip on the whistle when playing; I suppose it’s from playing guitar for so many years. The rolls come much easier and sound much better with relaxed fingers.

18

I think we have a problem getting started on things like rolls and cranns because it isn’t a single ornament on a note, its two ornaments. Its like rubbing tummy and patting head. Try explaining how this one long note can be chopped up and put back together either as this roll or that different set of shorter notes or this one note ornamented in a funky way.

I was trying to explain how to do a rocking pedal phrase to someone who can’t seperate what she hears from what she sees and ran into a roadblock trying to explain that the repeated note is there, but its in the background. She made it into a hornpipe rhythm…no no no, thats not what I mean. . .

19

As a classically trained musician I still want to play rolls the way I was taught, which is of course wrong for Irish music. I think Brother Steve has it right when he says:

  1. Forget absolutely everything you think you know about playing rolls.

  2. Now tell yourself, rolls are very easy to play on the whistle. (They are!)

  3. Now tell yourself, I have plenty of time to play rolls, I do not need to rush them or get tense. (You don’t. In fact you mustn’t get tense.)

That, dah-blah-blah, and practice, practice, practice.

20

I think DCrom is on the right track here. The building blocks are cuts and taps, and I think those should be worked on. A bit of that can be done in exercises, like playing scales up and down, cutting each note, and most of it can be done in the tune, cutting the strong beats and using cuts and taps to separate same-pitch notes. And it can be done slowly, with the cuts and taps being blips.

Once the cuts and taps are there (and that has taken me much longer than I thought, still working on it in fact), the problem of rolls is not one of learning the mechanics of the finger movements. I think, like Peter said, its one of hearing the ornament in the right place, because once the cuts and taps are there, you already can play a roll, there is nothing additional to learn apart from the stylistic issue. (I may be exaggerating a little.)