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Adding Bagpipe Spice to a Mando Reel

     It’s been a good while since I’ve talked about Celtic ornaments in this space, so I thought I’d trot out a favorite Scottish fiddle tune that sports a particularly nice ornament requiring both hands to accomplish.

     As you probably know, the whole purpose of Celtic ornamentation on the mandolin and mando family instruments is to make the mando sound as much as possible like other instruments that are already part of the Celtic tradition. Hence, mandos try to emulate fiddles, which in turn try to emulate the bagpipes and on back to the bagpipes emulating the human voice singing in a mysterious, ancient language. And each new instrument adds something different and idiosynchratic, making the music that much more fun to play.

     So here’s a great, rollicking 19th century Scottish reel called "Timour the Tartar." My setting is mongrelized from many sessions all over Scotland and years of questionable memory, but it still bears close resemblance to the version played and recorded by the great fiddler J. Scott Skinner in about 1910. Skinner, a flamboyant Highlander, was one of the true characters in the history of Celtic music. He performed right up to his death in 1927 at the age of 83 and published something like 600 original tunes. Some of his tunes were showpieces that would have done Paganini proud, and he loved playing in weird and difficult keys. But plenty of Skinner’s tunes are playable by us normal folks and common in the sessions to this day.

     I play "Timour the Tartar" with a very regular right hand pattern, hitting each of the four beats of each bar with a down stroke, coming up on the off-beats and either hitting the eighth-note that’s there or clearing the string in silence as the quarter note rings. This pattern is crucial for picking up the third note of each three-note ornament. Happily, for the left hand, the whole tune fits comfortably into first position, although the longer-necked mando players will have to stretch the pinky to the sixth fret on the D string.
The trick to mastering this little ornament (which actually harkens back past the fiddle to the bagpipes) is to match the intensity of the second note pulloff and the picked third note. You want all three notes in each triplet to be of equal intensity. This will take a little practice. The left hand position, also, will be slightly different for the ornaments ending on the open A string and those ending on the barred second fret of the D string, due to the pinky stretch.