"Irish" Technique on Low A

[Ailigean]

Hello all,

Could all of you who own the CD "Hailey's Song" by Willie McCallum please listen carefully to the "Friar's Britches." It's the last tune in the Jig set.

The last bar of every part goes (according to the score by Terry Tully) like this: G-D-E triplet on low A, G-Gracenote Birl on low A.

Here Willie seems to play something else instead of the triplets which sounds to me very much like a Cran usually played by Uilleann Pipers. Anybody have an idea what he plays and how this is done?

[Charlie Rutan]

I havent heard the tune

'cran' on GHB:

c grace
lo a
d grace
lo a
e grace
lo a

helpful???

[pancelticpiper]

Remember that a cran usually must begin and end with an "A" cut (what would be an "E" gracenote on the GHB) in order to achieve the "hard bottom D".

Every uilleann piper plays crans a bit differently, and crans will be played differently by the same player in different contexts.

The only "rule" seems to be that the upper-hand ring finger and lower-hand middle and index fingers are used, and that no finger can be used twice in a row.

So, translated to GHB, possible gracenote sequences for cranning would be:

CDE
ECD
EDC
DCD (Mick O Brien uses this one, which frees the upper-hand ring finger from the actual cran, because he uses it to cut the notes before and after the cran)
DCE (Pasty Touhey used this one)

Then there's the "long cran" which has four cuts:
DCDE (Mick O Brien etc)
ECDE
etc etc

[WileyBagpipes]

I only ever heard of a Crayola Cran... what are these things?

[J.R.]

The closest I've come is playing a DCE closed run on low G to low A. Not sure if that's what Willie is doing.