Triplets

American fiddle styles aren't typically as heavily ornamented as Irish, and a few ornaments, like triplets, are disappearing before our eyes -- well, our ears, anyway.

Slides are still common.  Here, I'm not talking about long slides, to connect a pair of notes, but the little slide up that slides into a note from half a step down to call attention to it.  

However, I've heard "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" at contras and jams, but never a single shake. "Shake" is the eighteenth-century word for a trill, and if you listen to the Chieftains, or some other traditional, Irish band play the tune, you'll hear a shake kick off nearly every phrase and see where the tune gets its name.  Over here, "shake" ain't nothin' but a verb.

And triplets?  The only local fiddler I listen to who'll toss triplets into his tunes is Hal Landem.  I've heard someone opine this is because Hal's played a lot of Irish music.  Nonsense.  Listen to recordings of Tommy Jarrell and you'll hear bushels of triplets.  Who's more Appalachian than Tommy Jarrell? Hal's playing what he hears.

Mandos, though, still do ornaments.  Some of this is the luck of being a fringe instrument: there isn't the pressure to follow the crowd that fiddlers have.  Some of it, however, is mechanical. Picks will draw you away from a steady "Mississipi, Missisippi, Mississippi, Mississippi" into creative punctuation.  Instead of the bump-titty of the banjo or the boom-chuck of the guitar, we get real ornaments.  Yes, we can't get a run of notes out of a single, long, bow-pull.  But a series of quick, repeated, separated notes?  No problem.  Play to your strengths, I say.

One flavor of these is the tremolo.  A picked note on my mando will ring longer than pizzicatos on a fiddle, but I can't stick a single, sustained note into a waltz, the way a fiddler can by just keeping his bow going.  Instead, I'll play a tremolo.

The other common flavor, ornamental triplets, are even easy to toss into the fastest tunes, so long as you start them the right direction: up.

An example will help. You can kick off Yankee Doodle with a triplet.  Sing this:

...
stuck a | feather | in his | cap and
called it | maca- | ro- | ni.  (So I say)
Yankee | Doodle | went to | town, a-
ridin' | on a | po- | ny.
...

The quick, whispered, "(So I say)" is a triplet that then lets you come down hard on the beginning of the verse: "YAN-kee."

To make that a strong down beat, you the triplet has to start on an up-pick. "(So I say) YAN-kee" is "(up-down-up) DOWN down."

Having established the habit of down-picking, it took me a bit to convince my right hand to start something by going up, but once I got there, it was worth it.