# Music by Genre > Celtic, U.K., Nordic, Quebecois, European Folk >  "triplets" in Irish music

## SincereCorgi

I'm making my way through the Enda Scahill tutor and discovered, to my surprise, that he's playing the triplets as two sixteenths followed by a regular eighth note rather than three eighth notes of equal length within the duration of a quarter.

So, from what I can tell from listening and looking through other forums, this is pretty standard in the style. So, does anybody have any idea _why on earth they bother to write them that way?_ My brain has been laboriously programmed to play triplets 'correctly' and this notation strikes me as almost perverse.

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## Steve L

Some people will refer to those ornaments as "trebles" where a beat is divided into 3 parts but the parts aren't equal, but you're right it's a misnomer though pretty standard in the idiom.  If you're just starting, be aware that triplets in hornpipes do tend to be just that.

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## Brent Hutto

Generally speaking, a given "tune" can be recorded in notation in a general way that admits various realizations as an "Irish tune" or an "Old-Time tune", etc. Those notes written as triplets and played as "trebles" by an Irish player may be played quite differently by a player from some other tradition.

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## SincereCorgi

> Some people will refer to those ornaments as "trebles" where a beat is divided into 3 parts [...] If you're just starting, be aware that triplets in hornpipes do tend to be just that.


Yeah, Scahill specifically calls figures 'triplets' when they change pitch – i.e. ascending D E F# – to distinguish them from 'trebles', by which he means the same rhythm using only one repeated pitch, i.e. D D D. I don't know if those terms are general to Irish music or just his thing. I honestly don't have any issues if a treble is indicated with a squiggle over a quarter note, but when they write out the triplet and write the '3' over the beam and stuff... my mind boggles.

I did find that a bit amusing that in hornpipes the triplets are correctly notated- but the eighth notes aren't. I guess I cut the hornpipe notation more slack since there's a precedent for it in swinging jazz.

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## Steve L

These are but some of the reasons that many Irish trad players hate "the dots".

Some players do hornpipes pretty straight.

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## Bertram Henze

> why on earth they bother to write them that way?


It is old Celtic tradition not to write anything down in the first place - following that, ITM tunes are supposed to be learned by ear, not from notation.

Of course, in a modern world you have to make this music portable somehow, so notation seemed to be the best approximation, used in the pioneering collections of O'Neill, Roche, etc.. But that is all the notation can yield: a guideline. I like to write tunes in a minimalistic, barebones ABC code without any ornaments, because every musician is supposed to make up his own ornaments anyway, based on what works best for his instrument. Even ABCs from thesession.org get the honor of being stripped of all unneccessary clutter by me.
To see ITM notation and expect it to do what classical music notation does, i.e. prescribe in detail what a certain instrument must do, is just not fair. Be content with getting a hint at what to play.

To summarize and answer that question: they should not write them at all. You are supposed to know where to do your triplets or trebles or quare bungle ryes or whatever you call them. That is your creative part in the tradition.

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## foldedpath

Ditto what Bertram said above. I'm not averse to sheet music or TAB if it helps get the tune in your head, along with listening to good recorded examples. But don't use it to learn the articulations (ornaments) that surround the main melody line. That's a strictly aural process... you have to _hear_ how to do it, listening to the best players, because it can't be written down. 

Something I learned from fiddle players is that you can't really learn ornaments by using software to slow down audio recordings either, because many of articulations happen at a speed that's independent of the tempo of the tune. The rhythmic flick of a treble ornament on tenor banjo or mandolin, or a cut or roll on a fiddle or flute, can sound about the same whether you're playing at a relaxed 80bpm or ripping along at 120 bpm. It took me a while to figure that one out, and it's another reason why sheet music isn't much help here.

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## Brent Hutto

My own current fascination (one of them) is fiddle tunes from Northeast Scotland and Cape Breton Island. Friend _foldedpath_ points out something I had recently "discovered" on my own. The figure written as a sixteenth followed by dotted-eighth is play with the "sixteenth" note very short. And as he said, that note is pretty much equally short on slow or fast Strathspeys, for instance.

Since my own technique limits the tempo at which I can play the tunes, a literal rendering of those figures at my practice tempo would be something like a 64th note followed by a triple-dotted eighth or some such monstrosity. Basically, the notation is just pointing out the difference between the beats which contain that "short-long" pattern versus the other places in which a plainer "long-short" pattern is played. The literal sixteenth-note-ness of what is written means nothing although at very fast tempos that's pretty close to how it comes out.

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## danb

When I write tunes out I'll use the 16ths + 8th notation, or the treble depending on the style of the tune. Mandolin ornaments (and fiddle for that matter) are better understood as rhythmic  than melodic!

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## JeffD

> Mandolin ornaments (and fiddle for that matter) are better understood as rhythmic  than melodic!


That is a real important point. 

Back in the way back, when I would maniacally transcribe my field recordings of sessions, I would write out the basic tune, as I heard it and fingered it, just as circles on a staff. Then I would go through it and get the basic timing down. The subtle ornaments and decorations I would kind of squiggle above and below in my own kind of scrawl. I have notebooks and notebooks of tunes like this, the basic tune written out and all kinds of scrawling suggestions as to how it was ornamented. I kind of looked on the ornaments as these little suggestions you could do that were added to the basic tune, and the transcription was not to read off of anyway, but to remind me of the tune, so I could play it later.

In some cases, for example the strathspey, I got it wrong, and what I thought was an ornament is fundamental to the tune. But mostly I got it mostly right.

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## Gelsenbury

> Ditto what Bertram said above. I'm not averse to sheet music or TAB if it helps get the tune in your head, along with listening to good recorded examples. But don't use it to learn the articulations (ornaments) that surround the main melody line. That's a strictly aural process... you have to _hear_ how to do it, listening to the best players, because it can't be written down.


I'm sure - I'm positive, even - that you're right there. And I wonder, for precisely that reason, whether there's any user-friendly way to "learn" ornamentation. The reason why this looms large for me at the moment is that it's my homework. My teacher spent a week teaching me a simple piece in basic form and then introduced me to some possible forms of ornamentation - no triplets here, but things like some extra notes, chords, hammer-ons, pull-offs, etc. Now I'm supposed to work these and other decorations into the tune, and I'm struggling really badly!

Maybe this has something to do with being used to learning from notation or tab, rather than by ear. Part of me wants to see the basic piece written down in order to start thinking about ornamentation. The other part doesn't want to go down that road because learning to learn by ear is a good experience for me in itself. It almost certainly also has to do with experience: 15 months into playing mandolin, I'm still at the stage where I have to put a lot of work into playing the tune correctly and at a reasonable snail's pace, never mind ornamenting it too. 

Reading about Jeff's notebook was interesting already, but I wonder if it would be too much of a hijacking of this thread to ask for more detail on how more experienced musicians memorise or notate (in other ways than with dots) good ideas for ornamentation?

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## Jill McAuley

My first foray into trad music was attempting to play the fiddle for a few years. There was a gal on one of the fiddle forums I participated in who was an awesome trad player. When folk would ask her "how do you know where to put in ornaments?", she used to answer that you just kind of "know" the more you play. For meself I found that to be true - I never really got there on the fiddle, but on tenor banjo/mandolin as I progressed I found that I was able to throw in triplets/unisons etc etc quite naturally. From the get go I was always listening to LOTS of trad music and I found that helped me to absorb ideas of where ornaments work well. The other embellishment, for lack of a better term, in playing trad is "variations" - playing them doesn't seem to get mentioned a lot here, but certainly all the teaching I received back home (via lessons or attending classes at summer schools) always covered the use of variations - we don't take "breaks" in trad music as they do in Bluegrass, so one of the ways we add a bit of our own "stamp" to a tune is via our choice of ornaments and throwing in some subtle (or sometimes not so subtle!) variations to the melody of the tune. I'll sometimes stumble across an idea for a variation simply by hitting a "wrong" note that sounds "right" when running thru a tune. But many times I'm also working them out in my head, without a mandolin in my hands at all - I might be out on me bicycle or stuck in traffic or waiting on the train, and I'll hum or lilt ideas for variations for a specific tune.

Dan hit the nail on the head though, with his comment about triplets being more about rhythm and not so much about melody - they have to rhythmically fit where you place them in the tune. I think perhaps a lot of folk having trouble playing triplets may be additionally adding a confounding factor to the whole thing by attempting to place them in parts of the tune where they don't fit in the first place.

Cheers,
Jill

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## Clement Barrera-Ng

> Reading about Jeff's notebook was interesting already, but I wonder if it would be too much of a hijacking of this thread to ask for more detail on how more experienced musicians memorise or notate (in other ways than with dots) good ideas for ornamentation?


I'm certainly no expert on this myself, but one thing I find, and it's something Jill had already pointed out, is that the more you listen to ITM recordings, the more of a feel you'll get as to where the best places are to put these ornamentation. And try to listen to as many recordings on as many instruments as possible - ie. don't only listen to mandolin playing ITM, but also fiddles, accordions and the pipes. Each one of them do the ornamentations a bit differently, and each player will also bring his/her own style of ornamentation to the table as well.   I have been trying ornamentations for a number of years now (with varying degree of success and failures), and I have a few 'places' where I normally would throw in some ornamentations on a tune. But when I hear another good player puts them in places that I had never imagined before, it opens up a whole new set of possibilities.

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## whistler

> I did find that a bit amusing that in hornpipes the triplets are correctly notated- but the eighth notes aren't. I guess I cut the hornpipe notation more slack since there's a precedent for it in swinging jazz.


But what could be the _correct_ way to notate the 1/8 notes in a hornpipe?  You might sometimes see them written as dotted-1/8 + 1/16 groupings - but I don't think I have ever heard an Irish player (or anyone that plays in the Irish idiom) play a hornpipe that way.  Notating a hornpipe in 12/8 would be closer to the mark, to my ear, but they are also often played much more like undotted 8th notes, with only the subtlest hint of 'swing'.

The 'triplets' in reels and jigs are, as you say, not really played as true triplets.  But given that reels and jigs (in the Irish tradition, at least) are rarely played with absolutely equal 1/8-notes, it is unlikely that these 'triplets' would be realised exactly as 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/8.  So, again, how do you 'correctly' notate them?  Seeing as neither way is faithful to what is played, it seems to me to be arbitrary, which you choose - and a triplet is perhaps the 'neater' of the two.

All this merely highlights the fact that staff notation was designed for and evolved within the Western Art Music tradition, and is inadequate for most other kinds of music.  The best that a tutor book can do is to make it clear that the notation is only an approximation and that _'all notes are not equal'_ - and, of course, include a demonstration CD.

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## mikeyes

Just to clarify for those who don't know, there are two types of "triplets", the musical kind which are written out in the music - mostly seen in hornpipes - and the ornamental ones which we are talking about here.  Tommy Peoples always tries to call ornaments "trebles" to distinguish them from the written triplet, but that nomenclature has not gained popularity.  

Written triplets are always in the same place and are part of the music.  Ornaments vary according to the player and the mood.  

Of course none of this makes it any easier to learn to play the ornament.  :Grin: 

How many on this thread use left hand ornaments in addition to the traditional right hand triplet?

Mike

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## Jill McAuley

I use unisons (double stops), chords, slides, and need to get back working on stuttered trebles/triplets on the tenor banjo. Don't seem to utilize pull offs that much, off the top of me head I can only think of 2-3 tunes where I use them, not sure why I neglect them so much!

Cheers,
Jill

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## whistler

> the more you listen to ITM recordings, the more of a feel you'll get as to where the best places are to put these ornamentation.


Absolutely.  Whilst the principal means of propagation of classical music is notation, the principal means of propagation of Irish traditional music is learning by ear - whether absorbing tunes by 'osmosis' in sessions or from recordings, or being taught phrase-by-phrase, note-by-note.   Consequently there are many features of the music that simply cannot be notated; the only way, therefore, to learn these is by listening to more experienced players.

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## whistler

> How many on this thread use left hand ornaments in addition to the traditional right hand triplet?


I use a lot of 'moving trebles/triplets' - i.e. picking a triplet with the right hand whilst playing 2 or 3 different notes with the left hand - but I'm not sure that counts as LH ornamentation.  I make little if any use of _hammer-ons/pull-offs_ in jigs, reels etc (although I do use them in other music), preferring to pick every note.  But, since I began playing the fiddle about 7 years ago, I have found that I quite often use an _upwards glissando_ - sliding up to a note from a semitone or whole tone below.

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## foldedpath

> How many on this thread use left hand ornaments in addition to the traditional right hand triplet?


I'll use a slide here and there. Depending on the condition of my calluses, I can sometimes do a series of hammer-ons and pulls that mimic a roll, for example the rolls at the beginning of the A part in "Morrison's." It's easier on the octave mandolin, where there is more sustain and the strings feel a little more malleable. A good cut or roll articulation on mandolin is brutal on the fingertips, unless you have calluses of steel. It takes a fair amount of finger strength too, at least with the string gauges I'm using. So it's not something I do as frequently as a fiddler would, but I'll try to sneak it in where I can. 

I don't use left-hand articulations when playing mandolin in a session, because it's just too quiet to be heard. It's something I think of more for playing solo at home, or in a duo or trio situation.

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## Clement Barrera-Ng

> How many on this thread use left hand ornaments in addition to the traditional right hand triplet?
> 
> Mike


After revisiting some of Gerald Trimble's and Brian McNeil's recordings, where they use the left hand articulation and ornamentation fairly extensively, I've been trying to do more and more.  Right now just trying to do the triplets with a hammer-on and pull-off combon, as in B-C-B using the index finger on the A string, while experimenting with just a down pick-stroke vs a down-up stroke, when the up-stroke comes after pull-off.  It provides a nice alternative to the right-hand triplet sound that I fear I may be over-using a bit.

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## SincereCorgi

> All this merely highlights the fact that staff notation was designed for and evolved within the Western Art Music tradition, and is inadequate for most other kinds of music.  The best that a tutor book can do is to make it clear that the notation is only an approximation and that _'all notes are not equal'_ - and, of course, include a demonstration CD.


Well, in fairness, the notation developed by the Wester Art Music tradition is very supple and  with tweaks  can be used to do a %95 good job of recording everything from various folk musics to ultra-modernist Brian Ferneyhough stuff. I would also suggest that notation is always a good thing (how's that for trolling?)- there's a good historical precedent for tune collections, presumably because people used them. I wish there'd been more gigantic collections like O'Neill's done at various points in history, however imperfect the notation. It's nice to think that we can all learn tunes at the chimney corner from granddad, but I don't think historically that's been the case, especially for working musicians who might have to play a dance late at night after an earlier gig in a theater orchestra. These things are seldom as pure as the folklore might suggest.

I agree with you about hornpipe notation, incidentally, although I think quarter + eighth in 6/8 or dotted quarter + eighth in 2/4 are both better that straight eighths. I'm not at all opposed to very simple notation that leaves ornaments to the musician's discretion (although a lot of O'Neills is very interesting because you can see how they used to ornament things). My feeling isn't that Irish music needs to be notated strictly, I was just baffled when it seemed to be notated wrong when the alternative was just as easy.

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## foldedpath

> Well, in fairness, the notation developed by the Wester Art Music tradition is very supple and  with tweaks  can be used to do a %95 good job of recording everything from various folk musics to ultra-modernist Brian Ferneyhough stuff.


Ah, but the obvious rejoinder is that missing 5% is what makes Irish music Irish, Scottish music Scottish, Cape Breton music Crape Breton-ish, and on and on. 
 :Wink: 

Its impossible to play well in those individual styles, if you don't express those differences. Somewhere on YouTube there's a clip from a workshop of Liz Carroll and several other fiddlers from different traditions, all demonstrating one at a time, how they'd play the same tune. The differences were obvious. It was in the twists and turns of bow technique and left-harnd articulation; the little bits that escape notation and you have to listen and learn to hear.

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## Shelagh Moore

I agree entirely with what Bertram said. You can only really place your triplets by getting a feel for the tune and no two players will play them the same. I personally don't like the modern trend of tripleting everything at high speed and tend to use them selectively and with other ornamentation. I'll also use triplets differently on the mandolin and tenor banjo for the same tune.

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## Bertram Henze

> How many on this thread use left hand ornaments in addition to the traditional right hand triplet?


Playing an OM, I have let the triplet take a back seat in my toolbox. Mostly I do ornaments that utilize the longer sustain, i.e. doublestops and chords, also hammer-ons or hammered-on doublestops. Very rarely I do a slide or a doublestopped slide  :Grin: 
Ornaments get more interesting if combined with each other.

For those who insist on correctly writing ornamentations down, I'd recommend special symbols for Irish ornaments, such as
- a shamrock for a triplet
- a shillealagh for a hammer-on
- ...

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## Bertram Henze

> ...I wonder, for precisely that reason, whether there's any user-friendly way to "learn" ornamentation. The reason why this looms large for me at the moment is that it's my homework. My teacher spent a week teaching me a simple piece in basic form and then introduced me to some possible forms of ornamentation - no triplets here, but things like some extra notes, chords, hammer-ons, pull-offs, etc. Now I'm supposed to work these and other decorations into the tune, and I'm struggling really badly!


Like you must be able to walk before you can dance, basic effortless playing of the tune is a mandatory precondition for starting on ornamentation. 
The charming thing about many ornaments is that they sound like mistakes that are accidentally right (e.g. a hammer-on is really a note picked on time but fretted "too late"), but to convince a listener that they aren't real mistakes, everything around them must be right. The other way round, I suspect that many ornaments played by professionals are really mistakes caught just in time in an elegant way.

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## danb

> How many on this thread use left hand ornaments in addition to the traditional right hand triplet?


All the time! I picked up one stylistic idea from Terry Woods (of the Pogues), which is frequently to play the note under the one in the melody line and hammer-down to walk up the scale.

I'm frequently wont to do pull-off ornaments that more closely resemble the sound you'll hear on the fiddle rolls than a standard staccato Irish triplet. 

Sam Bush's triplet with a hammered-down middle note often finds its way into my tunes.. and then there are the more Uilleann pipe sounding ones, where you hammer-down on a note higher up the scale (say from open E to the A on the E string, then pull off again)..

There's a ton of them really. One I often find overlooked is playing legato, or using hammer-ons or pull-offs to get the sound of the shared bowstroke.. works great in a polka, for example.

Many many more..

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## liestman

All the time here too. I pretty much use the notions that danb expresses above with the addition of a double hammer on (i.e. at the start of The Choice Wife or whatever you fancy for the name of that tune, on the D string, a downstroked E, hammer on F sharp, hammer on G, picked open A).

True, this stuff gets lost in sessions, but I know I am doing it and I am at least playing as much for myself as for the other musicians. Also, it helps that I play a National RM1, so maybe not as much of it is getting lost as one might think, but in the end, you have to first satisfy yourself that you are giving the tune your all, and then worry about the other musicians and audience after that.

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## Randi Gormley

Interesting stuff, all. One thing that always surprised me when people debate standard notation vs the way it's really played is the insistence on matching them exactly. I can't tell you how often I've heard people in our group -- invariably the less confident players -- say, 'but I learned it as a dotted eighth and a quarter' or 'but the version here on the page says triplets, and some people are playing it as a single note so which is it?' as if the music itself were preserved in wood or ice or something that doesn't meld and blend as it's recreated for each session. I think first you have to understand the dynamics of music itself (sorry, that's probably not the right word. I don't mean loud/soft, obviously), and a lot of people seem to have skipped that part and gone straight to playing the notes. The best musicians understand music before they move into applying the details, imo.

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## danb

Yep.. it's an "Aural" tradition too, the notes/dots/quavers and all that are there to describe it.. they can to if you are quite technical and use complicated notation..

that said, they tend to be written out quite simply, and then the genetic variation in pools of tradition promote lots and lots of variety. The written notes are kept simple enough to give you the bones of the tune and let you embellish.

This stuff is organic, and always moving..

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## Schlegel

In classical music you aren't playing exactly as written either, with regard to timing. It may be closer to the notation than Irish is, but it's still only a guide, and you must have a feel for the music to get it right.  I've heard versions of the same Bach violin piece that you would not even think were the same piece of music because the bowing and timing were so very different, and those were by professional violinists working off the same score.  It sometimes seems like classical scores tell players everything, but that's because there's often an orthodox consensus about how a piece should be interpreted. (especially if it never falls out of repertoire)  If you listen to very old recordings and newer ones you sometimes find the common interpretation has changed.  It's happened even to warhorses by Bach and Beethoven.

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## danb

I've taught classes before- usually I'll pick a really really easy tune, and bombard people with ornaments. I think if I teach lots of techniques to embellish, they naturally start falling into the tunes- but only the ornaments & styles that folks like!

Irish music is fantastically egalatarian. You'll get some pools of "guardians of the sacred flame" that treat trad music like a re-enactment ceremony. If that floats their boats, cool for them.. but I'm hardly ever playing the same tunes the same way consistently over time.

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## zoukboy

A couple of ideas I'd like to add to this discussion that I have found very helpful in my own playing and teaching:

1. So called "ornamentation" in Irish trad dance music is really not ornamentation at all, at least in the sense that most other musics would use the term.  What we call "ornamentation" in ITM is actually a system of articulating dance music on wind instruments, first the uilleann pipes and then the whistle and flute.  On the pipes, these "ornaments" are essential techniques for delivering a specific rhythmic outcome on a reed instrument for which tonguing and embouchure are not available.  These devices are not optional in the sense that ornamentation usually is, i.e., as decoration or variation, they are an integral part of playing *that* music on *that* instrument.

When that Irish dance music tradition was transferred to instruments that entered the tradition later, i.e., fiddle, flute, etc., etc., these techniques were adapted to the newer instruments in order to achieve the same rhythmic objective.  Since the separation of notes on these later instruments is so easy and natural (bowing, tonguing, plucking) the adoption of piping techniques is optional, but since the rhythm is the goal they were indeed adopted.  (A prominent fiddler once said to me that in the absence of the uilleann pipes no one would have been crazy enough to come up with Irish fiddle styles!)

2. Unlike the "core" melody instruments in ITM, the fretted instruments don't *have* to have these rhythmic devices in order to achieve the desired rhythmic outcome, but they have become important for getting the music to sound "right" on them.  In other words we expect to hear these conventions as part of the music.  To us they are part of the style.

3. I always suggest that fretted inst players who want to learn how to play ITM well get a tinwhistle and learn a few jigs and reels and the basic techniques (cuts, taps, long rolls, short rolls, cranns, etc.).  As someone who plays uilleann pipes and whistle I can say that direct experience of ITM on a wind instrument is probably the best way to learn what is essential about that music in a very focused and distilled way.

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## Loretta Callahan

Triplets, oh triplets, why are you so ficklets ~ can it be that my picket is bad?
Triplets, oh triplets, please show me your tricklets.
Without you, this mandolin just might get sad.   :Crying:

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## Kay Kirkpatrick

> Triplets, oh triplets, why are you so ficklets ~ can it be that my picket is bad?
> Triplets, oh triplets, please show me your tricklets.
> Without you, this mandolin just might get sad.


How clever, and true! After reading this thread, I'll be learning them and their appropriate use aurally from Three Mile Stone and the posters at SAW.

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## Jonathan Reinhardt

Nice to read this. Thank you all for your insight.  I have just about pulled the plug on a recent tune from the "new" tune phase in our band. I actually wrote this tune 4/4 but as of yet I have no one who understands how to play it. They claim that it's 6/8, or heaven forbid 12/4(?). I give up (not easily, but still give up). 
I chalk it up to 1) my ignorance in writing music, 2) a general lack of understanding mandolin on the part of non-mandolin players (were they ever really listening?), 3) inability of the band members to seriously grasp the function of triplets, trebles, 4) understanding of hornpipes, airs, and other subtle traditional timings, and the ways to accomplish them, may not be a strong point of the group, although in all fairness, we have done harder work with success. I did not think a 4/4 would create such a problem. (Unless I am not teaching it well, or it is not truly 4/4!)  All I know is that it works fine whenever I do it solo, 4/4. Triplets and all. When we do it as a band 6/8, it tends to become fussy and loses dignity/integrity.
To sooth my weary soul, I listen to Clarence White (and others) after these disturbing practice sessions. I do realize that timing is something special, something to set us solidly within the framework, or set us slightly apart (for better or worse), or even show us our glaring inadequacies and shortcomings as musicians.

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## PlaneSimple

So, having played the Scottish Highland pipes in my youth, I should say that embellishments are usually written as if they have a defined duration.. like 16th notes.. however they actually begin WITH the note. If "Po-ta-to" is the embellishment and "Pie" is the note in the melody, say a quarter note.. and Pie should fall on the third beat, then when that third beat comes along, you play "PotatoPie" all in the space of that quarter note. As you become a faster and better player your embellishments get shorter.. but not so fast that they disappear please!

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## Kay Kirkpatrick

Plane, that's a very good explanation, thanks.

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## Brent Hutto

It's a major difference between embellishments in Irish/Scottish/Cape Breton and similar traditional music and classical music where a "grace note" actually comes before the beat. Or at least that's what I remember from music lessons many years ago.

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## timthebear

Great discussion! Learned a lot. Still can't play rolls worth a darn. V interesting to compare to discussion on ornaments in Classical forum re: left hand possibilities.
tgb

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## Loretta Callahan

Okay, so when I play a reel, the rhythm is watermelon, watermelon, watermelon, watermelon; jig: pineapple apricot, pineapple apricot, pineapple apricot and so on.  So ... then .... when a triplet comes a long .... I toss a potato in the mix.  I think I have it.  Time will tell; thanks, PlaneSimple!

So far, there doesn't seem to be anything with meat in it; but that's ok.




> ..... If "Po-ta-to" is the embellishment and "Pie" is the note in the melody, say a quarter note.. and Pie should fall on the third beat, then when that third beat comes along, you play "PotatoPie" all in the space of that quarter note. As you become a faster and better player your embellishments get shorter.. but not so fast that they disappear please!

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## Bertram Henze

> Okay, so when I play a reel, the rhythm is watermelon, watermelon, watermelon, watermelon; jig: pineapple apricot, pineapple apricot, pineapple apricot and so on.  So ... then .... when a triplet comes a long .... I toss a potato in the mix.  I think I have it.  Time will tell; thanks, PlaneSimple!
> 
> So far, there doesn't seem to be anything with meat in it; but that's ok.


Sounds like a recipe for the famine soup of A. Soyer, author of a famous cookery book  :Wink: 

A triplet embedded in a reel would go like this:
watermelon
watermelon
peppermintmelon
watermelon

or, with more nourishment:
egg and bacon
egg and bacon
sausages bacon
egg and bacon

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## sykofiddle

I'm coming at this having played fiddle for 20 years, then giving it up for mandolin in the last year.  So the idea that "rolls" are rhythmic ornaments is intuitive for me.  The challenge now is finding a way to pick them with my right hand and "grace" them with my left at the same time.  It ain't easy!  

Here's a question that's been plaguing me.  It has to do with successive triplets in a reel (e.g., Toss the Feathers, Em version, Maids of Mt. Kisco, etc.).  The basic phrase is 1& (1-2-3) 2& (1-2-3) where (1-2-3) is a triplet, roll, or equivalent ornament.  

So....do you pick 

du (dud)  du (dud) 

or 

du (dud) ud (udu)

??     

I find the first way much more natural and it it's analogous to certain bowing techniques with which I'm familiar. HOWEVER, I speed seems to be limited because it interferes with the natural back and forth of continuous dududu picking. 

Any thoughts??

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## Bertram Henze

> du (dud)  du (dud) 
> 
> or 
> 
> du (dud) ud (udu)


Fiddlers have the advantage that they can bow up and down with equal strength, which is not the case for most pickers. So, for the sake of accentuation, the first option will be better in the long run. 
Having said that, I often do (udu) triplets if they come in handy with the picking pattern, but even more often I just leave notes out if they collide with my picking pattern. So, there is a third alternative:

du (dud) .u (dud)

with the dot meaning an 8th pause.

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## PlaneSimple

There is a system called "Canntaireachd" which was used to teach piping wherein the embellishments and gracenotes (which may be a series of three or four, sometimes more very fast notes) are given vocal equivalents, little made up words or syllables. The notes of the pipe scale had their vocal equivalents too (very much like solfege(sp?).. do, re, mi etc). I was a musician long before I took to piping, so shifting my brain to the idea of gracenotes and embellishments using the time of the note (and not preceding it) was very hard indeed. My old teacher used words like po-ta-to pie. It suddenly made sense.  Learning the pipe tunes as silly songs with funny words really helped.  And that's how they teach classical piping.

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## Loretta Callahan

Indeed, the funny words and silly songs do help us learn, PlaneSimple.  Thanks for the egg, sausage and bacon, Bertram ... works better for these cold nights than all that fruit.

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## Jim Burke

> Here's a question that's been plaguing me.  It has to do with successive triplets in a reel (e.g., Toss the Feathers, Em version, Maids of Mt. Kisco, etc.).  The basic phrase is 1& (1-2-3) 2& (1-2-3) where (1-2-3) is a triplet, roll, or equivalent ornament.  
> 
> So....do you pick 
> 
> du (dud)  du (dud) 
> 
> or 
> 
> du (dud) ud (udu)
> ...


This is exactly the question that I have been asking myself, for want of a more learned person to ask. I have had my mandolin for all of 8 days now, but it's not my first instrument so I'm making some progress. Like you, sykofiddle, I don't find either of the two alternative's you've identified very satisfactory, and so I'm experimenting with doing the trebles (triplets? . . . whatever) starting with an up pick. Of course, leading with the upstroke might be a bit of a leap for some folks, but it seems to me it might work out. Anyway, I'm trying it this way:

1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
d d udu d d udu

What argues for this, for me, is that I really like doing the trebles in jigs using udu, and this method will let me do them the same way in both reels and jigs.  

Of course, . . . this might be a really bad idea for reasons that have not yet occurred to me.  

Any thoughts would be most welcome.

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## SincereCorgi

Unfortunately, there's no general agreement on the best picking approach for that, Jim. (At least none that I've found) Most people prefer to have downstrokes on down beats, since they tend to be louder, and therefore they advise 'strict' up-and-down (i.e. DUDU) picking whenever possible, but you'll frequently find yourself in situations that require you to 'cheat', especially where triplets are concerned.

If it's a melodic triplet (i.e. not a repeated note) one thing you can do is try to use a hammer-on/pull-off for the second note and then catch the third on the upstroke- D (H) U. This preserves the down-up picking, but sacrifices some of the clean rapid-fire sound you get from straight picking.

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## zoukboy

> This is exactly the question that I have been asking myself, for want of a more learned person to ask. I have had my mandolin for all of 8 days now, but it's not my first instrument so I'm making some progress. Like you, sykofiddle, I don't find either of the two alternative's you've identified very satisfactory, and so I'm experimenting with doing the trebles (triplets? . . . whatever) starting with an up pick. Of course, leading with the upstroke might be a bit of a leap for some folks, but it seems to me it might work out. Anyway, I'm trying it this way:
> 
> 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
> d d udu d d udu
> 
> What argues for this, for me, is that I really like doing the trebles in jigs using udu, and this method will let me do them the same way in both reels and jigs.  
> 
> Of course, . . . this might be a really bad idea for reasons that have not yet occurred to me.  
> 
> Any thoughts would be most welcome.


The most common approach for reels is: 

DUDU DUDU etc

With the trebles you mentioned it would be like this:

DU DUD  DU DUD

The reason for this basic un-ornamented picking pattern (in reels) is that it supports the inherent unevenness of the rhythm, i.e., all the downstroke notes (except for those in a treble) are lengthened. The way this is accomplished is by delaying all the upstrokes.  (This unevenness can be fairly subtle in reels but is usually more acute in hornpipes.)

There is nothing "wrong" with what you propose, Jim, and if it gets you the musical results you are looking for then go for it, I say.  But it is atypical.

Good luck!

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## Loretta Callahan

Relevation from my wonderful teacher, Zak ... yes, that's relevation .... I'm elevated and released by this one.  I'm not gonna worry about triplets.  They'll appear when they're ready.  I'm going back to enjoying playing the tunes I like ... and learn to play them well without any Christmas tree ornaments.

I'm so fried from working with crazy old filmmakers and young, ambitious filmmakers, I don't have much left at the end of the day.  My arms are so sore from the computer, I can barely pick up mandolin anyway.  If my mandolin ain't gonna inspire me and feed my spirit ~ 'cause I'm all buggered up about triplets and whatnot ~ it ain't worth it.

Maybe I'll push myself this winter; maybe not.  Don't figure I'm gonna be playin' with Tim O'Brien anytime soon in this lifetime anyway. :Wink:

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## Jill McAuley

I know a great young fiddle player back home who, when asked about ornamentation and how/when she "knew" when to do it in a tune, her reply was just that the more you listen to the music and the more you play the tunes, you'll just kind of "know" - you'll know the feel of the different tune types and then they'll lend themselves to ornamentation (or not).

Cheers,
Jill

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## Clement Barrera-Ng

> I'm not gonna worry about triplets.  They'll appear when they're ready.  I'm going back to enjoying playing the tunes I like ... and learn to play them well without any Christmas tree ornaments.


I think you have just hit upon an important revelation (no pun intended).  There is a lot into playing a tune that doesn't involve ornamentation, and its absence from a tune does not automatically make it 'boring' or plain.  Personally, I think that there is at times too much emphasis being placed on ornamentation, triplets, quadruplets etc. at the expense of all the other important elements that makes for great tune playing.  Having started doing some classical mandolin playing myself, I've come to realize how important things like phrasing and dynamics (loud or soft) are to the structure of a tune. I hope to be focusing on more of that in the next few months, and worry less about how clean my triplets are.  

Funny you should also mention Tim O'Brien. I was listening to some of his live recordings from this year's Telluride (or was it last year), and on one of the Irish tune he did, I think I counted fewer than half a dozen triplets. But there was so much more going on in his playing - slides, dynamic changes, creative phrasing etc. - that he kept me (as I'm such the entire live audience at the time) on the edge my seat the whole time.

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## Loretta Callahan

Thanks, Jill and barrangatan, for the feedback ....

  It's definitely all about the feel and instinct as to when a triplet gets played ... but then I'm not a music conductor :Wink: .  I know when they'll fit in when I play, and they sometimes happen.  If they don't, no sweats.  Actually, Jill, your triplets on _Wind that Shakes the Barley_ were what first inspired me.  I love listening to your version.

  There's something really special about Tim O'Brien's playing, barrangatan, that keeps me on the edge of my chair also.  It's many things and his phrasing is one of them.  Plus, he's so relaxed, yet packs a punch.

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## foldedpath

> It's definitely all about the feel and instinct as to when a triplet gets played ... but then I'm not a music conductor.


I think there's a little more to it than just feel and instinct, except perhaps where that feel is developed after listening to a lot of traditional players on other than fretted instruments (which I'm sure you're doing, based on that tune list in the other thread!).

There's a method to the madness of ornaments in Irish trad, and I think it has to do with its early development on instruments like pastoral pipes, which couldn't stop the airflow like the more modern Uilleann pipes. If there are two consecutive notes in a tune at the same pitch, how do you separate them if you can't stop the air flowing over the reed in the chanter? That's where the "cut" comes from... a quick blip of the finger to articulate the attack of the second note at the same pitch, using another note at a higher pitch. Notes can be separated and elaborated with other little finger blips like the strike (a "cut" below the pitch), the short and long roll, and many of the other articulations that help separate notes on an instrument where the sound comes out in a steady stream. 

Later on, fiddlers and players of other sustaining instruments like accordions started figuring out how to adopt those articulations so the music still sounded "Irish." Tenor banjo players and now mandolins are the late-comers to the party, figuring out how to use treble ornaments because we can't do a true cut or roll (we can't sustain our notes).

All of this came home to me recently, when I started learning to play the Irish flute (and I'm still terrible at it, but into it enough to learn a few things). Suddenly I understand what a "cut" is. Ah Ha!, it's a cool way to separate two notes inside a continuous air stream, instead of using the tongue. Tonguing is used heavily in classical music, but Irish trad is essentially a legato style on flute, broken by a bunch of finger articulations, which sort of mimics the early pipes. That's kind of a vast simplification, but I think it's more or less right (someone correct me if it's way out of whack).

This feeds back to my thinking on where to place trebles and other ornaments like hammer-ons and pull-offs when playing mandolin. 

Are there two consecutive notes at the same pitch in a tune? Ah ha... that's where a treble ornament might go. Is there a note held for a bit, where a fiddler might be playing a long roll? That's another trebling opportunity on mandolin. It's not a strict formula, and you still have to develop your own personal style in where and how to ornament a tune on mandolin. But it's helped me think about the big picture. This music didn't adopt ornamentation out of thin air, as some arbitrary style. There's a tradition based on the limitations of early instruments, and it can help guide one's thinking about ornamentation.

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