Why Do We Find Rolls Difficult?

Whistle
21

Maybe not think of it as a long note sounding as one with ‘something funky’ happening to it but see it for what it is, the long note that is written is actually a series of two or three times the same note but separate by cuts and taps, it is only written as a long note for sake of clarity or simplicity, ease of reading.

Look at the figure [like the start of The Ash Plant] BE~E2 where the long E gets an off-beat roll or a cran. In the case of the cran, it’s no more complicated than : BE {G}E{F}E , where the cran itself is only two Es separated from each other and from the preceding E by two cuts [or if you prefer a more intricate double cran the E is played as a triplet of Es separated by cuts : BE (3{A}E{G}E{F}E]. If you think it helps write or think of it as BEEE.

22

I think it is worth mentioning that the first note of a roll should be leaned on. It is the main note so should be heard as such, it also helps to kick it off.

Dave

23

This discussion has confirmed a veiw that I was coming to anyway. The key to ornamentation in general and rolls in particular is acquiring a deep understanding of its/their functional role in driving the music and, after that, mimicry. Obviously the more you listen to good, well articulated playing and the more you think about, as well as feel, what you hear, the better you’ll get at it. With practice of course.

This doesn’t mean that I think that the verbal advice I critiqued in my first post is worthless. I have only the highest respect for the teachers from whom that advice comes, all of whom play Irish whistle much better than I do. The paradoxes and puzzles I drew from that advice come not from following it so much as from expecting too much from it. It won’t carry you as far in Irish music as it will in some other styles because it can’t carry you very far. I tried to explain why and I haven’t seen any serious challenge to that explanation—well, not yet anyway. What that means is that you shouldn’t expect too much from it and you shouldn’t get frustrated when it lets you down. You might, for example, then have to follow somewhat contradictory advice. This can unnerve people but I don’t think it should. Who cares if the end result is better playing. For example, there might be a role for starting off practicing slowly but you won’t be playing rolls at all until you can blip and that requires speed which has to be acquired. Also, if you learn by the dah blah blah method, expect problems playing along with slowed down music and expect to have to make adjustments you wouldn’t normally have to make when you start to speed up. You can only understand the role of the roll as a rhythmic device when you hear it played at full playing speed although full playing speed might not be very fast if the player you are learning from has chosen a moderate tempo. Well, I hope this makes sense to a few of you, especially to those who find rolls frustrating.

24

I don’t see how this relates to rolls more than to anything else in ITM, Music, Life, the Universe, and Everything. For every endeavor I have taken up in life, I’ve received contradictory advice. Usually to the point of mutually-exclusive contradictory advice. Take classes with one whistle teacher, visit the workshop of another, and you can rest assured one will tell you A, the other will tell you B. Part of learning ITM or anything is sorting stuff out, it is part of the required effort, happens anyone. What I mean by “required” is that if you don’t undertake the effort of listening hear and there, comparing, and making judgments between one way or another, you will not get the Music.

(For those who find the absence of clear, unambiguous answers a strain: Ask yourself if you want to learn The Music, or if you’d like to feel good about what you are doing right now.)

Also, if you learn by the dah blah blah method, expect problems playing along with slowed down music and expect to have to make adjustments you wouldn’t normally have to make when you start to speed up. You can only understand the role of the roll as a rhythmic device when you hear it played at full playing speed although full playing speed might not be very fast if the player you are learning from has chosen a moderate tempo. Well, I hope this makes sense to a few of you, especially to those who find rolls frustrating.

I didn’t want to get into it before, but now that you are taking silence for assent, I would like to mention that I don’t see what you are saying. I work a lot with slowed-down tracks and there is no problem at all learning rolls slowed down. In fact it is remarkably instructive to hear a quick little “brrr” unravelled to a “byaaaaa-dlaaaaa-dyaaaa” and to notice the rhythmic precision in it. Sowing good players down confirmed the “dah-bla-bla” approach for me, and the fact that the cuts & taps may end up being slightly longer blips never struck me as an issue because they were still obviously blips and not notes.

Not that I am any sort of authority, but when someone asks me about the mechanics of of playing a roll (and not about the stylistic question the answer to which is a roll), what I’ll say is: Listen for them a lot; work on your cuts and taps; start by slowing down to the point where you are counting eigths; practice rolls every day.

25

Then look harder. In most endeavours there’s more than one way to do the job well. But if you want to learn well, you pick A’s method or B’s method and stick to it, at least during the learning phase. My view is that you probably can’t consistently stick to the Bill Ochs method or the Cathal McConnell method if you want to learn rolls. And I clearly explained why. Do you practice taps and cuts slowly? How long can you make a blip last for?

I wasn’t denying this. My point was not that it isn’t instructive to slow down and hear something fast in a way that can be broken down into components whose relative length and placement can be used as guides. My point was that you can’t practice at that pace, playing along in time to the record, or a metronome for that matter, and make blips where the cuts and taps occur without altering the relative length of the various constituents that make up the roll. Now perhaps you have to do this first and then get the rhythm down later. But, nothing you say here bears on my argument in the sense of pointing to a flaw in the reasoning.

Let’s be clear about one thing. Learn, using whatever method works best for you, whether or not it makes theoretical sense to me or to you. My claim isn’t that there is a single way to learn to play rolls well nor that there is no way other than mimicry at full pace. I’m trying to explain why a particular ornament causes a lot of players more difficulty than it should. The problems I point to are just that—difficulties, not insuperable barriers. If someone (perhaps you) doesn’t have a problem then there is nothing to explain, or if your problem seems different, perhaps it is. But since rolls are rhythmic devices and since the problem I point to is a matter of rhythm, it looked like a promising avenue to explore. I make no claim to have discovered a better method for teaching rolls and my point isn’t meant to replace any of the advice out there—if you heard me play them you’d know how ludicrous that would be.

:wink:

26

You solicited comment, so let’s not get too huffy if I offer comment. :wink:


You clearly explained why. But I just don’t agree. I agree neither with your premiss (rolls are hard[er]) nor with your conclusion. I think, in fact, that you HAVE to stick with one approach or the other. Pick one teacher/method or the other (doesn’t matter that much), and learn it. Then you can understand and profit from different approaches. Switching only works after you’ve gotten to a certain level, when it become vital. This has been my experience in anything I have learned in my life, esp. anything that didn’t come easy.

Reading this post now makes me realize that I don’t agree with your conceptualization… it too theoretical and brainy. Like this:

Nothing was more rhythmically instructive to me than slowing down the rolls. I felt that I had learned rolls (ok, I still haven’t, but you know what I mean) when I was able to play a jig at 80 bpm, 100 bpm, 120 bpm and 140 bpm and the rolls were rhythmically correct at each of those speeds. What worked for me was conceptualizing the roll as individual eigth notes and not as one rhythmic unit. If the (long) roll is not one unit, but just a label for a group of three notes, then the issue of “how long are the blips” and the “slowing it down will distort the rhythm” goes away, I think. Seems to me the cuts & taps should be conceptualized (if at all) like points in geometry: no length to themselves. A cut is just another way of starting the eigth note, and it is part of it. You don’t fear rhythmic distortion by slowing down a tongued tripled, I presume. The reason why teachers insist on the “blip” character of cuts and taps is to stress the point that they have no time-value, no rhythmic dimension to themselves but are just a way to attack the note. (This is probably an exaggeration for purposes of driving a point home; but don’t take this to qualify the substance of my point.)

It’s only a promising avenue to explore if there are differing views on it, right? (I don’t like your “perhaps you” parenthesis because it sounds like you are peeved by my somehow implying that I have greater skill or talent, or whatever. I am—in all my charactistic humility—the member of this board with the best-documented and vouched-for problems with rolls. So let’s have none of this “perhaps you” nonsense.)

I will agree that rolls have an air or mystique about them that cuts and taps don’t have. But I don’t think that people have any more problems with rolls than they have with cuts and taps. In fact, show me the beginner who can do his cuts and taps well, but can’t do a roll well? In my universe, once you’ve got your cuts and taps crisp and blippy and have heard in the music that the long roll is just three notes of the same pitch, then rolls are easy.

DISCLAIMER: There is a real likelihood that you have stated your views clearly and that I have still failed to understand them. What I write above may not contradict or even relate to what you are saying. Part of that may be that I conceptualize the issue differently; more likely it’s my fuddled brain.

LATE-BREAKING THOUGHT: Perhaps we can agree on this: The challenge of cuts and taps is in your fingers; the challenge of rolls is (only) in your head.

Best,

27

I only noticed the implication after you pointed it out, actually. Honest. But I still bet my rolls stink more than your rolls.

Thanks for the input Bloomy. It’s a bit late to pick points where I still want to disagree—maybe tomorrow—but this is exactly the kind of discussion I wanted to stimulate.

Oh just one comment. As for being too cerebral—guilty as charged of course. But all that stuff about rhythmic distortion is diagnosis of a problem. I don’t think about that when I’m playing. I don’t think about it when I’m eating either.

I actually doubt very much whether we disagree nearly as much as we appear to, but we might as well keep trying.

28

I am looking forward to it. :slight_smile:

Yes! I didn’t answer this before. The flick of the finger stays fast, should stay fast because it can never be fast enough. The duration of the cut or tap should (conceptually) approach zero. The notes should be played slowly so that your fingers have time to learn the flicks that make the cuts and taps.

29

Hi everyone

There is no way I am going to read this entire thread so apologies if I repeat what anyone else has said, step on any toes or ruffle any feathers.

Here’s my short answer to the question Wombat formulated. If you continue to find rolls difficult then

  1. you are thinking too much about them
  2. you ought to consider taking up another hobby

If you are convinced that possibility 2) is not the case, then it must be 1).

At this point let me confess that the entire Bro Steve site (an enterprise that I sometimes consider I should never have started) began as an attempt to put some easy-to-follow instruction on rolls out on the net, where I heard enthusiastic players proudly putting “rolls” into clips plastered on sites here and there that were just so far off the mark it was tragic - tragic, I thought, considering that other learners were presumably assuming this was the right way of doing them. Whatever.

As far as thinking too much is concerned, the daftly-named dah-blah-blah method is an attempt to totally deintellectualize the learning of rolls. A thread like this one would suggest that for quite a few people, it has been a miserable failure in this respect.

What other advice can I offer? I didn’t learn rolls by dah-blah-blah. I struggled with them for a year or two, on fiddle. At that time I listened to records pretty much all the time, and went to sessions in London where I could watch good players. But it still eluded me.

One day I suddenly “heard”, as if for the first time, the way a certain player executed them, as a single sound. This was a non-dbb style, in fact a highly compressed style of long roll, and I suddenly heard it as a “kick in the tail” at the end of a long note. Once I’d heard that, it became simple - took a few minutes to get it down in fact. And it was easy to do the same thing on the whistle, which I took up at about the same time, although not seriously at that time. (Should a tin whistle ever be serious?)

(A few years later I consciously changed the way I played rolls on fiddle and whistle to dbb style, merely because I liked it better. But there are lots of ways to skin a cat.)

Why do I tell you this story? Because I firmly believe that if you really hear in your head the sound you want to get, your fingers will (sooner or later) find a way to make it. And if not, well… see 2) above.

(OK for kindness I should add case 2a) : Maybe you should consider emulating a simpler style of playing Irish music )

Now, how to “get the sound in your head”? You know the answer to that one already. And I don’t believe you should bother about slowing down recordings with software. There are plenty of recorded players who play at a steady enough rate that you can hear what’s going on.

Get your thinking caps OFF and your listening caps ON. Stop droning on about it and start doing, really really doing. All of you, including diehard Brother Steve proponents.

Nice weekend everybody!

30

OK, I’m getting roll anxiety after following this thread! :laughing: I THINK my rolls are OK, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve done some work on them, dah-blah-blah has been enormously helpful, but I don’t think they were terrible to begin with. I’ve the ASD software and am listening and working on Bro. Steve’s site. I think I do better by not stressing over them, but then I don’t know that I’d have the courage to go before Bill Ochs as Bloomfield so valiantly did. Mr. Ochs would probably burst my my-rolls-aren’t-so-bad ignorant blissful bubble!

31

It’s already been said, but learning rolls correctly is all about aural context…this means they are particularly frustrating to learn if, before playing Irish trad, your background was in Western classical music (and you didn’t grow up listening to IRtrad). Classical turns are similar in construction, but the internal timing is completely different, so if you’ve been a classical player, learning rolls is pretty frustrating. Your ears don’t hear the correct internal timing of the Irish rolls, but your fingers know the right notes.

Anyway, when I teach people how to play long rolls, I break the roll into two parts…too complicated to go into here, but it works. Besides the internal rhythm of the rolls themselves, the biggest problem most people seem to have is playing the tap short enough.

32

To Peter Laban: The whistle teacher you mentioned earlier, how exactly did she play that roll (the one she learned from W. Clancy)? I was hoping you would explain. Was it a double-cut roll? Was it pointed? Did she use alternative fingerings? Did she change the bag pressure? Spare no details, please.

To Janice: I found this little green book about Irish music. It contains transcriptions of recordings by Ennis, Heaney, Clancy, Doran (eight or so times through “The Blackbird,” each time different), Coleman, O’Meally, and others. There’s a section describing different rolls played by Coleman. Of the four or five rolls, there’s one that looks like a turn. In Highland piping, you can separate two notes with a “grip,” and the whole movement has a rhythm like a turn. Also, to make taps shorter, I only cover half of the hole.

Ed

33

It was Brid Donoghue by the way it was definitely not double cut , it was in the rhtyhm and the fact she used the tap in an unusual way, a bit hard to describe exactly. I recorded her playing a few tunes on the whistle for the transcription page that was in full swing at the time and she did it on one of those too [Humours of Derrykissane], I never used teh recoring for the ranscriptions. It was just an example of how a different approach can create a very different effect. I suppsoe that’s what makes Irish music so interesting, the little interpretations and non standard stuff.

34

Double cuts can be mighty attractive when the ol’ fingers aren’t cooperatin! :smiling_imp: I just wonder if some pros don’t…never mind.

35

I seem to recall some people saying that the cut and tap in a roll should be so fast that the actual pitch of the cut and tapped notes is of no consequence at all. If this were completely right, there would be no difference between a double cut and a roll I think. I suppose the pitch is important in that the cut note must be higher and the tapped note must be the note immediately below the rolled note, yet the cut and tap be so fast that the notes be not articulated as distinct notes. Yet that higher/lower relationship to the rolled not must be audible.

I’m amused at the number of people who say rolls aren’t/shouldn’t be a problem and then go on to admit that they themselves don’t play them very well, or that so many others play rolls that sound tragic or that they came easily after daily practice for about two years. I suppose what people are really saying is that playing anything well requires dedication and practice and rolls are in that regard no different. Well, we don’t have regular threads in which people anguish about how hard it is to slide up to a note or to execute a Scottish snap. These ornaments require lots of practice too.

I didn’t start this thread because I’m having special difficulty with rolls although I readily admit I don’t yet play them to my satisfaction. I’m getting steadily better with practice and I feel as though I know where I’m headed. I agree with those who say one shouldn’t think too much about playing them, so long as you mean that you should try to clear your head of the theory when practising. What got me thinking about them was reading Bloomy’s recently revived thread and wondering why so much pain was leaping from the screen at me. I don’t want to make people fill their heads with theory when they play; that would be a disaster. I just think that if we think a bit about their role in the music and the reasons why they might be harder than they seem for the learner to execute, then when we do practice we won’t get so frustrated and might relax more, thus making quicker progress. Those lucky enough to have a good teacher won’t need this advice.

36

In taking quite a few lessons from Scoiltrad, I found it interesting that Conal O’Grada teaches most rolls with the tapped note being TWO notes below the rolled note. He says it sounds better. At first I wondered what difference it could possibly make, but after practicing it for some time I realized it did sound better, more “in tune” somehow.

Susan