Ornamentation: vibrato, slides and note shaping on the ocarina

English

Ornaments are decorations which you can add to your music to add interest and emphasize notes. They can be thought of similar to spices, changing the aural 'flavour' of the music.

Ocarinas can perform many different kinds of ornament. As usual they have been explained assuming C fingerings, but work equally on ocarinas in any key.

Vibrato

One of the easiest ornaments to get started with is vibrato, a simple wavering of pitch commonly used to ornament long notes.

Vibrato is created by slightly wavering your blowing pressure. Let's start by revisiting how to exhale at different rates:

Place one of your hands on your belly and the other on your ribs. Take a few breaths, feeling your belly moving in and out and shoulders remaining stationary.
Next, take a deep inhalation from the diaphragm, form an aperture between your lips as if saying 'boo', and exhale as rapidly as you can. If you pay attention to your chest, it will feel similar to saying 'Ha'.
Secondly, breathe in as before, but this time hum, or place your tongue behind your teeth and make a 'tss' sound, noticing that you're exhaling much more slowly.

And let's apply this to creating vibrato:

First, form a lip aperture as discussed, start blowing at a low pressure. Smoothly ramp up until you're blowing as hard as you can, then ramp back down to a slow rate.
Blow at a steady rate, and slowly raise / lower your breath pressure by a little.
Now just grab your ocarina, finger any note, and repeat the same breathing, you'll find that you're playing a slow vibrato.

With regular practise it will start to become automatic, allowing you to speed it up without trouble.

Refining your vibrato

Good vibrato should be uniform both in its rhythm (the time between each pulse) and also the amount of pitch variation. It's easy to develop by practising to a metronome:

Set a metronome to between 40 and 60 BPM.
Choose a note in the middle of the range and start playing a long tone.
Start varying your pressure to produce vibrato, aligning the peak or trough of the oscillation with the click.

The pitch change should not be excessive; a fluctuation of 10 to 20 cents on a tuner is fine as a starting point. Try to keep your vibrato so that the pitch bends sharp and flat around the fingered note by the same amount.

Once you've got the hang of practising one pulse per click, try gradually working up the tempo. As tempo increases you may want to reduce the depth of your vibrato.

Also, it can be helpful to practice vibrato as a triplet, three wavers per click, and again gradually work up the tempo. I picked up this technique from a flute teacher, and it can help to make your vibrato sound more organic.

Another way to develop vibrato consistency is to practice with an audio reference of even vibrato. Listen to differences between what you're doing vs hearing, and aim to eliminate them.

Its pretty easy to synthesize such a reference using a modular synthesizer, which are available as web apps for free. NoiseCraft for instance. The basic idea is to take an oscillator at the pitch of the note you want, and modulate its frequency by another oscillator at a lower frequency.

Applying vibrato

As noted, the most common use for vibrato is to ornament long notes, and I'd recommend looking through the music you play and find some slower songs with long notes, and try introducing vibrato onto them.

In doing this, you may notice that to make a vibrato that sounds even requires a much larger change in pressure on the high notes than the low ones.

It's worth spending some time practising playing vibrato over the instrument's range, aiming to make the pitch change consistent.

Other things to be aware of

There are a number of ways of varying vibrato to create different musical effects. It can vary both in its depth, and the rate of the pitch changes.

Once playing vibrato starts to feel natural to you, you may want to experiment with these things to see what musical effect they have. It's even possible to vary them over the duration of a note:

You could start slow and speed up, or start shallow and increase the magnitude.
Or the inverse, starting rapidly or deep, and gradually tapering off.
Or it could vary over the duration, such as starting slow, speeding up and slowing again.

These techniques are quite common in the playing of flute and similar instruments, and studying some performances would be a good idea.

Slides (Glissandi)

A slide or 'glissando' is a smooth pitch change between two notes, as opposed to the normal sudden 'stair step' transition.

Slides are an effective way to create emphasis when used sympathetically with the style of music. Do note however that unless you have a deliberate reason to do otherwise, a slide should always go to and from a definite note. They are not an excuse for sloppy intonation.

Ocarinas can play two distinct kinds of slide: finger slides and breath slides. Finger slides are the more versatile, and breath slides will be addressed a bit later in the article.

Finger slides

The easiest kind of finger slide is between two adjacent notes. You slur them in a single breath and move between them by sliding a finger onto or off of a hole. For instance:

Finger D.
Slide the E finger backwards off the hole.
At the same time, raise your pressure a little to correct the pitch.

And you've played an ascending slide from D to E.

In sheet music the standard way of notating a slide is to draw a straight line between the heads of two notes, like this:

However there are a lot of ways that this could be played, in regards to the rhythmic timing of the slide, and how long it is in relation to the two notes being slid between. For example, a slide between two quarter notes could:

Start during the first note and end in time with the start of the second (left).
Start at the beginning of the second note and end during it (middle).
Start during the first note and end during the second (right).

These are visualised below with graphical notation. The dark coloured dashed lines are one beat apart, and the red line shows a plot of pitch over time.

To practice these you might find it useful to track the subdivisions as shown above with a metronome. For example, to play the first one:

Put on a metronome and treat each click as an eighth subdivision.
Play a stable G note during the first click.
Over the second click, play an ascending slide from G to A.
Play A for the third and fourth click at a stable pitch.

Another option would be to find audio references, or ask a more experienced player to demonstrate them, and copy the timing by ear.

Once you've got the hang of playing slides in isolation, try putting them to use in a simple melody, both ascending and descending. Playing a descending slide is the same but reversed. Place the finger next to the hole, then slide it forwards.

Finger slides over a wide interval

If you want to play a slide across a wider interval there are two ways of approaching it:

First, the slide can span the entire interval between the notes.
Second, leap to the note above / below and slide from there.

The technique for the second is no different than previously discussed, but there are a few techniques for sliding over the whole interval:

Slide several fingers at once, practicing slowly to get the coordination right.
lower your wrists and pivot the fingers up away from the holes.

Though do note that slides across a wide range are extreme effects in most kinds of music and won't be used that often. An example can be found in the opening clarinet wail in "Rhapsody in Blue".

Slides between natural and cross fingered notes

Sliding between natural and cross fingered notes, or cross fingered notes to other cross fingered notes isn't much more difficult, and just entails sliding multiple fingers at once, timing them so that one finger is sliding off a hole as another is sliding onto one.

One way to get started with this is to start playing slides in a scale such as F major on a C ocarina. For instance, to slide from A to B flat, slide your left middle finger off its hole, while sliding the right ring finger onto its hole at the same time.

Slides over a wider interval just require sliding a few more fingers onto and off of holes at the same time. As with everything, practice the finger movements slowly to get a feel for it, and then speed it up.

Other variations

The duration of a slide can vary from extremely brief, to taking the majority of the duration of a given note. Longer or shorter slides can be practised as discussed previously, but using more subdivisions to give greater accuracy.

Another variation on slides is to approach the note from the opposite direction. For example, if you are descending from a note to another note, you could slide upwards from the note below. Here are two variations in graphical notation, one that rapidly slides into the note, and one that's more gradual:

Applying and practising slides

The best advice I can offer for practising slides is to choose one or two of the variations and practice them over the range of your instrument. Then try putting them into music and seeing what you like the sound of.

Then as that gets easy, experiment with the other options as you become more comfortable playing them.

As always, it's worth listening to performances for reference. There are many examples in Irish flute and fiddle playing, native American flute music, and side guitar.

Breath slides and note shaping

Slides can also be performed by varying your breath pressure, the result of which being to change the pitch and volume simultaneously. To experiment with them just finger any note, and slide into or out of the note by slowly raising or lowering your blowing pressure.

Breath slides serve a different function to finger slides, and its easiest to demonstrate why with an example. Say you wanted to perform an ascending breath slide from a note to the note above, you'd have to:

Start by fingering the lower note in whatever scale you're in.
Increase your breath pressure until the pitch matches the target note.
Suddenly change your fingerings to be 'correct' for the target note, and cut your blowing pressure.

The transition would sound quite harsh as you'd go from an overblown 'airy' sound to the normal timbre, and there is a good chance the second note would begin sharp.

Personally, I find breath slides most useful for starting or ending sections of music, and shaping notes.

Firstly, breath slides can be an effective way of starting notes as the combined volume and pitch slide provides a kind of fade in, and can work especially well in slower music.

Breath pressure can also be used for shaping notes in other ways, changing the pitch of a note over it's duration. An easy example being an imitation of the pitch bends often done by guitarists, where a note is bent flat or sharp before returning to the original.

And a rhythmic pulsing of the breath can be used to mark the beat. The technique and approach to practising this would be similar to vibrato, just deliberately irregular.

Exactly how you'd want to use these varies between genres of music though, and it would be best to listen to and replicate some music in a style similar to what you want to play.

I would however advise against using a breath slide as a final fadeout as it sounds amateurish in most kinds of music.

True fadeouts are possible on the ocarina, which is addressed next.

Creating 'true' fadeouts and volume dynamics on the ocarina

It is possible to create 'true' fadeouts on the ocarina by varying breath pressure and fingering at the same time. To get started with it:

Finger G (C ocarina fingerings) and blow it at the correct pressure.
Slowly lower your blowing pressure, and at exactly the same time roll back the high C finger, partly venting the hole.
If the two actions are perfectly synchronised they cancel each other out, causing the volume to drop, and the pitch to remain constant.

To begin I'd recommend trying to slightly reduce the volume of the note in 'steps':

Slightly lower the pressure.
Adjust the fingering to compensate.
Return to the 'normal' fingering, and try to reproduce both actions at once, causing the volume to drop a little, without impacting the pitch.
Having one of these in muscle memory, try adding another 'step' following it, with a slightly lower pressure and more venting.

Doing this trains you to automatically know how much the finger must move in relation to the change in breath pressure, enabling you to vary them smoothly. It needs to be practised gradually over a notable period of time.

As was noted in the discussion of vibrato, ocarinas are much more sensitive to pressure changes on the low notes than the high notes. This is easier to achieve on the higher notes which is where I'd recommend practising it at first.

And when trying this on other notes, I'd recommend venting the smallest hole available as it will be easier to control.

Closing notes

Having so many kinds of ornament and so many variations of each one may feel overwhelming. So to get started I'd recommend choosing one or two ornaments at first, and stick to playing them in one way until you get comfortable with them.

You can find some example of these applied to music in Ocarina articulation and ornamentation applied. I'd also recommend looking for audio examples of their use in the kinds of music you're interested in playing.

If you'd like even more ornaments to experiment with, two more options are pulsing a note using a tongue roll, similar to how a rolled ‘R’ is performed in some languages, and multiphonics, created by ‘singing’ or ‘humming’.