Using long rolls
"Off-beat" rolls in reels
Short rolls
Moving on
This page is intended
to give you an overview of some of the varieties of rolls that are commonly
played, and how and where they can fit into dance music. The sound clips
are mostly tune snippets, mainly for demonstration purposes. A further
page or pages will give entire tunes that you can use to work on your rolls
in depth.
Using
long rolls
"Off-beat"
rolls in reels
Short
rolls
Moving
on
That nice F# long roll that you had going so well at the end of the last page. Where can we put it?
One obvious place is dotted quarter notes on the "on" beat. Below is the first part of the jig The rambling pitchfork. Our F# roll can fit nicely on the dotted quarter note at the start of the first bar.
Listen to the first
line: 
(45K)
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Please remember you do not have to play a roll every time you arrive at this place in the tune. For the sake of the listener, and for your own amusement, vary by playing F#-E-F# from time to time, or three separate F#s, or just one long plain F#, which you can dress up with a tap or a slide. |
Another example of a long roll on F#, in a reel this time, is the first note in The wise maid, given below.
Listen to the first
line:
(54K)
These are some examples
of long rolls. So far we've only covered the note of F#. To play rolls
on other notes, follow the fingering patterns you learned for cuts:
| To play a roll on E... | cut with the G finger | and tap with the D finger |
| To play a roll on G... | cut with the G finger | and tap with the F# finger |
| To play a roll on A... | cut with the B finger | and tap with the G finger |
| To play a roll on B... | cut with the B finger | and tap with the A finger |
Don't be surprised if you find rolls on A and B, and particularly A, more difficult. Your top-hand ring finger is weak, and you may find it hard to execute a convincing tap at first. But with practice, you'll get rolls happening nicely here too.
Rolls like this one are normally called short rolls because they occur on a quarter note. But I refer to them as "off-beat rolls".
Why use a different term? Well, for practical purposes, I consider that there is no great difference between the way rolls of this type are played and your ordinary long roll. Because I (and most other players) do not tongue the quarter note, but do (usually) tongue the preceding eighth note, I would argue that the roll is spread over three eighth notes, like the ordinary long rolls shown above.
Here
is an example (12K) of an "off-beat roll" on an F#. Sounds like
"yah-dah-blah-blah"!
The feel is a little different, because
the beat or accent falls differently. But if you can play the long rolls
in The rambling pitchfork and The wise maid, you should have little difficulty
in adapting your technique to these off-beat rolls.
Here are some more examples of off-beat rolls at start of the reel O'Mahoney's.
Listen to the first
line:
(45K)
O'Mahoney's is a four-part tune that might be a bit advanced for you if you're just starting with rolls, but I thought of it because of all those off-beat F# rolls.
Here's
another tune to demonstrate both off-beat rolls and long rolls on other
notes -- G, B and E. It's called The castle reel and it appears
(with a different name) on Mary Bergin's wonderful first solo album, Feadoga
Stain. (Please don't compare my pedestrian rendition with hers, even
if my playing of this tune has definitely been influenced by hearing her
play it.)
This is a larger clip, so if you have a slow internet connection I suggest you start downloading and then have a look at the music and the comments below.
There's lots to look at in this transcription. You'll spot the long and off-beat rolls easily enough, but there's a couple of other tricks, discussed below.
Even though I am
playing this tune a little quicker than the earlier examples, you should
still be able to hear the good old "dah-blah-blah" sound coming through.
Listen for it in the playing of top whistlers, fluters and pipers.
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In the first part, second bar, second half, you'll see a couple of sixteenth notes. Basically the C# has been inserted to fill in the interval between the B and high D. (You'll often see this figure written as a B-C#-D triplet, but in fact the way I've notated it is more accurate.). |
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In the second part, third bar, you'll see a G-Cnat-G triplet. This looks very impressive, but all you need to do is lift your B finger at the right time. The rhythm is quite different from that of a cut, which is why I have notated it in this explicit, if somewhat complex, fashion. Of course there is no melodic reason to play a C-natural in this tune, but as is often the case, you don't really hear the note's pitch. I notated it as a C-natural purely to indicate that I lifted the B finger while keeping the A and G finger down. |
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In the second from last bar, there's a long roll on a high G. This is very much the climax of the tune, and so to give the long roll a little extra, I have slid into the G from the high F#. I'll discuss stuff like this in a future topic on techniques for combining ornaments. |
The technique for playing short rolls is similar to that for long and off-beat rolls, except that everything is compressed. You have to spring into action immediately, without sounding a long "Dah". The following clip is of short rolls played on E, F#, G, A and B.
Here are some examples of short rolls in the reel The morning dew. The second part of the tune (the second line in the music below) contains a repeating pattern of quarter-note Bs on the first beat of the bar. These are typically decorated with short rolls.
I think you'll agree that by the time we reach the end of the second part all these short rolls are getting a little monotonous. Normally I would do something else with some of them, but I thought I might as well ram the point home for you. But I couldn't resist throwing in a long roll in the second part of the last-but-one bar.
Among the things we could do to vary these quarter-note Bs are:
Updated: 16 March 2001