How to sound like a real Irish flute player in a few easy lessons
Disclaimer:
The following are some comments of questionable value from Mark Polczynski, M and E Flutes webmaster, who brought you the widely acclaimed Irish Flute Tutor web page.
Introduction:
There are people that have spent many years working very hard to become excellent traditional Irish flute players. Others of us, for various reasons (lack of time, lack of initiative, lack of talent, lack of attention span, and, what was I saying?) will never reach this level of play. However, it is possible to fool your musically challenged listeners into believing that you’ve got this Irish music thing under control. Try these easy lessons.
My most humble apologies to real traditional Irish flute players. If you have any suggestions (such as: Take this page off the web right now!), I’ll probably be anxious to take them into consideration in future revisions of this page (typically about once per year, maybe). Hopefully, these comments will add some fun to your musical enlightenment.
One other thing. Do all of the stuff suggested here in the extreme whenever you practice. Then, as you get better and actually play for real, you can back off on this stuff to add variety and impart your own personal style to your music.
Lesson 1: Tonguing Notes
Don’t ever tongue a note, ever, if you can possibly avoid it. This isn’t John Phillips Sousa. Even after you take a breath, start the next note with a “Ha” sound, not a “Ta” sound, right down deep from your diaphragm, like a belly laugh, a real explosive “HA!”. This takes some diaphragm strength and coordination.
Sometimes you’ll have two of the same notes in a row. How can you separate these notes without tonguing? This is where you know if your “HA!” maneuver is strong enough. If it is, it should separate the notes nicely.
This is also an excellent place to put a grace note, or “cut”. I’m not going to get into the general subject of ornamentation here, but the idea is to flick a finger up, or possibly down, to create a quick little “chirp” note between the two same notes you need to separate. In fact, for beginners wrestling with where/how to do ornamentation, this is an excellent place to start putting in these grace notes. It’s guaranteed to sound Irish. Here’s a sound clip of how this might sound.
Lesson 2: Breathing
Breathing – the beginner’s worst nightmare. But you can turn this necessary evil into an interesting ornamentation.
At first, you will always be running out of breath at the most inopportune times. (By the way, expect to be dizzy and lightheaded at first, too – this will pass with time). As you play faster and learn to control your breath, you will be able to stretch it out so that you are only breathing at the natural ending points of a phrase. Now, if you record yourself playing and play it back, it will sound very much like a polka band. I should know, I’m Polish.
Taking a breath between the end note of one phrase and the beginning note of the next seems natural. One key to Irish music is not always taking a breath where a listener would expect a breath, and not always breathing in the same spot every time. So try this, instead of breathing between the last note of the first phrase and beginning note of the second phrase, try to not breathing between the phrases (like this). Take a breath after the first phrase, not the second phrase (like this). This will sound just terrible on some tunes, and you wouldn’t do this every time through, but you should try this on different tunes to see where it fits.
Another thing you can do is just skip a note every once in a while and breath in instead of blowing out. Where would you do this? Wherever the missing note gives a nice “bounce” to the tune. Imagine someone dancing along with the music. At some point, they leap in the air. You skip that note, breathe in, and “bounce” along to the next note when they land. That’s how you can turn this necessary evil into a nice ornament. Here’s another clip. Notice the missing notes and the breath on the second time through the phrase.
Now, back on our Irish Flute Tutor web page, I made a big deal about why you should always memorize your tunes. I find it really difficult to just drop a note for a breath and then pick right up with the tune if I haven’t memorized the piece forward and backward. I suppose people more musically inclined than I can just do this, but I think you’ll find that memorizing your tunes will really help this breathing thing.
Lesson 3: The Roll
OK, enough trivialities, let’s get to the real stuff. There are all sorts of cool ornamentations that you could spend years practicing, but you really only need to know one to sound like a real pro. That’s the roll. Above, we talked about how you can separate two of the same note with a little chirping grace note. Basically, the roll is the same thing, but you are separating three notes. Here’s how you do it:
Start by playing a G, which is all three left hand fingers down. (This example is for a flute in the key of D, but the finger combinations work for flutes in other keys). Now lift your left ring finger to sound an A. Now put the left finger back down to return to G. Next, put your right index finger down for an F#. Last, pick the right index finger back up. That’s a G roll.
Do this very slowly a whole bunch of times until everything flows smoothly. Then, make the A and F# between the G’s a little bit shorter, say half as long as the G’s. Keep doing this. Now make the A and F# even shorter. Keep doing this, and keep making the short notes even shorter. Eventually you will be just flicking the ring and index fingers up and down. Do this as fast as possible, but not so fast that you can’t hear nice crisp chirps between the G’s.
What about notes other than G? It’s really pretty easy. Just go one note up and one note down from the note you are rolling. If you try this up and down the scale you will find some combinations that this doesn’t work well on, so just improvise. Don’t be a slave to any one roll pattern, try going two notes up and/or down sometimes. In fact, this is preferred in some cases. For example, E and F# rolls are often played by lifting the left index finger to an A for the first note in the roll, instead of playing one note above E and F#. Here’s a more complicated set of rolls.
That seems like a lot of work for an ornament that you can only use whenever you have three of the same note in a row. But that’s not the point of the roll. You can pretty much use the roll whenever you have a run of three notes, even if they aren’t all the same note. To do this, just play the three notes as if they were all the same note (listen to this). You can also use a roll whenever you have a single note that you play long enough so that you can squeeze three notes into that space.
Playing rolls rapidly and rhythmically is very tough for beginners, and even beyond beginners if you don’t play a lot (like me). Since this is such an essential part of sounding Irish, and since you need to practice this so much to sound good, I recommend that you put them in wherever you can. It’ll sound goofy, but that’s why they call it practice.
Conclusion:
The purpose of these suggestions is to get your tunes sounding like Irish music as fast as possible. If you start doing this stuff right from the beginning, it should be easier for you to become a real Irish music player as you continue to practice and learn from real Irish musicians, either in person or from CDs and stuff. Hopefully, this will also provide you with some challenges in addition to just learning notes and tunes. If you don’t agree with what you’ve read here or on our Irish Flute Tutor web page, don’t just sit there, speak up! I’d be delighted to add/modify/delete any or all of the above. Someday. If I feel like it. Thanks!