I?m able to roll my Rs easily, but I?ve discovered that my husband can?t. Our son is really struggling with this and I wondered if anyone can offer any tips on how he can get going? Is it one of those things that you can either do or you can?t, or is there some way he can learn?

Can't help, I'm afraid, but I would love to hear what others suggest because I can't roll my Rs either.

Neither can I...

W

DS has the opposite problem and over rolls them! have you told him to do rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr on it's own for now to start him off. If he''s not used to singing regularly then I would start humming notes with every letter of the alphabet but just make sure he lowers his jaw with every note as it's common to say E,C,B with a wide mouth like this:

I'll send DS over at some point for an R rolling session, but he may ask for a go on the trumpet as payment!

Thanks! I couldn?t work out what he was talking about when he came back and said the boys were doing a ?machine-gun noise? warm-up. Took us a while to realise what he meant. I?ll give it another try in the morning..

"thudududududududud" was recommended to our choir as an exercise by a voice coach*. That's a starter for getting things moving.

*Guildhall singing teacher with MANY MANY years of experience

I cannot roll my Rs either and have never been able to. I was originally given to understand it was either something you could or couldn't do, though singing teachers seem divided on this. That said, of the three singing teachers I've had, none of them have been able to successfully teach me this

I dislike the rolling of R's and I'm not quite sure why it's done. The voice is beautiful and shouldn't be spoiled but what would I know!

I think it's something you can either do or you can't. My daughter and I have "always" been able to roll our Rs; my son and my husband can't. I don't think it's an enormous disadvantage unless you want to do flutter tonguing, which I understand needs similar tongue movement (though I'm happy to be corrected by anyone knowing more about it).

A rolled R includes something like a "T" or "D" sound, because the tip of the tongue contacts the front of the hard palate. Though it's not exactly like that, because when people say "ta", they often use the whole flattened tip of the tongue, whereas a rolled R is just the tiniest tip of the tongue

It may be easier at first f you don't bother trying to pronounce the voiced "R" and just "whisper" it like "HRRRR..." - certainly easier if you start on the breathy "haaa" and then raise your tongue up to flutter against that ridge like a reed, rather than starting on the non-rolled R sound.

Really hard to explain without the diagrams I use when getting Japanese students to hear the difference between D, R,and L!

But wait! Somebody has taken it to a whole nother dimension!
This video shows the rolled R being produced well forward in the mouth, right behind the teeth, but it can be anywhere on the ridge of the hard palate.

I'm pretty sure it can be learned with a bit of the right sort of practice. Spanish uses a rolled r quite a lot and I was really surprised to find during my recent choir experience at Dartington that I was having trouble with the singing the rolled r warm-ups. The tongue seemed to have loosened up by the end of the week, thankfully.

There is an even more difficult rolled r in Portuguese (some forms at least) which is produced further back on the tongue towards the soft palate (an uvular or velar trill, if you're into the technical lingo...). A bit like a French r but with a distinct trill to it. Try that for a bit of tongue gymnastics!

One of my students was at a distinct disadvantage, not being able to roll her "r"s. She was preparing an aria in Italian for a festival. However, she is the determined type! She started by placing the tip of her tongue in the correct position, between the alveolar ridge and the front teeth, and blew through it, soundlessly. When she could do that, she started adding sound, and can now do it about 50% of the time in songs - it has taken months.
She will have to get better though as she wants to take a diploma, and rolled "r"s are required for Italian, Russian, sung French and German. She got away with it at grade 8, but languages have to be perfect for diplomas.

Great approach! Hope she does a little every day. (Maybe she could start using a Scottish accent:P).

I had always believed you could or you couldn't and that if you hadn't managed it by the time you were 20 you would never do it. I had got through university and through a year at the RAM as a singer and I was still having to compromise.

I could do three different Rs:
1)The r that comes from the protruding lips and the teeth just touching the inside of the bottom lip. This can often come out as a w and sometimes as a v (I remember telling a steward at a music festival that our recorder group was playing Serenade, and it went down on the mark sheet as 7-ade! This is the sort of r that is being attempted by people who end up saying Woy Wogers.

2)I could purr like a cat. This was the nearest I could get to a rolled r and what I had to use for years, but it wasn't very satisfactory. It was nearer to the spoken French r (but in classical music the French use a rolled, Italian r!) This I had always been able to do on my voice, and I felt it rolling in the back of my throat.

3)I learnt to do a flipped r - often used by Americans to sound English, so I was told - whcih is a single flick of the tip of the tongue against the ridge behnd the teeth, from curled up to straight. Best practised by saying "hoddible" and "Ameddica" with no friction at all on the d part, just keep it very light, and don't let your lips try to do it too, as it my first example. I understood, the year I lived in America, that it was used to try to get rid of the American R which wasn't rolled either, just came from almost closing the back teeth completely. I was flummoxed when my singing teacher over there told me the first thing I needed to getwas a "meer" a what? "a meer. A full length meer so you can see your face and your posture"

BUT THEN: I was about 22-23 and thought I was just one of those people who couldn't, and someone said something which triggered it for me. The trouble is that everyone describes what it feels like to them, and if it doesn't feel like that to you, it won't work for you. This person said something about letting it come rolling right down the middle of your tongue until it reached the tip. I purred, adding the voice, and for me it worked. I've since managed to get someone else to do it by asking for a good strong sung purr and then lifting a relaxed and fairly thin-flat tongue position which was behind the teeth but not quite touching the teeth and not quite touching the ridge either. The purr should - OK, if you're lucky, the purr might - set the tip of the tongue vibrating. I can now say and sing that word, "vibrating", with all those four different rs, and they all sound completely different.

I'm afraid it all boils down to getting the right "trigger" for you. (Hmm, back to Woy Wogers again?)

ok so I can't roll my r's either.... but I've just spent half an hour trying to do these ^^^ and all I've succeeded in doing is making myself look and sound like a berk It sounds like I'm gargling with listerine.....

OMG I've tried that and I can do it!!!! I'll have to work on the consistency, but I can do it!

See, just needs a teacher who knows what they are doing

I've heard people saying before that it is hereditary whether you can flip/roll the R, but that's just not true. It's genetic whether you can roll up your tongue, but that's something entirely different, and you don't need to do that to flip/roll the R (in fact, that would be very strange indeed ).

Some can do it straightaway, some need time (and patience), but if the teacher knows how to properly advise on it, everyone can learn it.
I still need to meet a single student who can't, or whom I wasn't able to instruct on it. The problem is usually that students are too impatient and give up on it too easily - or that the teachers either never learned it themselves and therefore can't teach it, or that they had the natural ability to do it and for that reason never bothered looking into what goes on physically, so they can explain it to others.

So in short: Yes, one can absolutely learn to flip/roll the R.

I need to hide this post from Him Indoors who goes off into a rant about ppl who use their lips to say "r" - he thinks it's laziness!

Well yes, there is of course such a thing as rhotacism (Wossy springs to mind ), but the jury is out as to whether it's just down to actually allowing the children to get away with it/not starting speech therapy early enough. Most speech therapists I know regard it as one of the easier speech impediments to cure in young children.

In case of the flipped R, we are talking about people though who have no problems whatsoever pronouncing the R as such - they just think they can't flip it. To be unable to produce a rolled R, you would also have to have massive problems with pronouncing alveolar or postalveolar sounds, especially the plosives (t, d) and approximants (l for instance).
So I'll let you off if you can't pronounce any of those and will send you to a speech therapist - if you can say T, D and L, you can also flip your Rs, provided you are not giving up easily

It can be learned with speech therapy. (By which I don't mean that speech therapy is necessarily the only means to achieve it.)

Being a Welsh speaker where the rolled r is vital, I've always been able to do this. We also have a r sound where an h is sounded at the same time (it's a stand-alone letter in the Welsh alphabet - Rh. Several names start with this - Rhiannon, Rhodri etc.), and I've found that some people who previously had trouble with the rolled r are sometimes able to roll it when they also have the h sound added. I wonder if it may be to do with the extra breath that's pushed through with the rh sound?

The thing that gets me is that Him Indoors thinks HE could explain to someone exactly what they should be doing... sigh...



Very plausible, I would say.

That's interesting. I'm not very good at the Welsh Rh sound (I had a work colleague called Rhian who was much amused with my efforts) but I can easily roll my Rs. I don't remember ever having actively learned to do it, but I have memories of childhood Christmases with my mother reminding me to sing "The rrrising of the sun and the rrruning of the deer".

There are some excellent posts on this board. The number of people like 'Jonathan Woss' who really can't roll their rs is much lower than many make out and normally has something to do with the alignment of the jaw. A lower jaw that is forward of the upper teeth does hamper the production of flipped or rolled r.

However unlike 20-40 years ago modern dentistry tends to sort out problems with bite earlier rather than later and this in turn corrects most speech defects.

The tongue has to learn exactly where it needs to go. Speech therapists and Singing teachers who know what they are doing should be familiar with types of consonants, a quadrilateral of vowels, and exactly where the lips teeth and tongue needs to be to articulate each phoneme or blend of phonemes. Many also read the phonetic alphabet.

I can not add to what Linda.ff and AnnC have already said about the rolled r and how it can be taught. Dugazon is also quite right in that as long as you have a decent teacher who is prepared to be proactive and stick at things, and ensure you as a pupil practise, you will get there. I cured a lisp that way. (That also had a dental cause)

The rolled/flipped r is necessary for various languages, but I can also understand MNW's point, when overdone it can sound very ugly. It really should not get in the way of the music. However that is the same with all consonants. Maintain line and phrasing, enunciate clearly, but don't disturb the flow of the music.

Does anyone else find that those who can't roll the r are also frequently unable to do a lip trill?

While I have no trouble teaching and overcoming problems with certain letters - the Welsh Ll being the worst (think Llanelli), I find that the rolled r and the lip trill are the hardest to overcome, I think mainly because the lips and tongue just aren't able to relax enough to produce the required movements. And the harder you try the less relaxed you become.

Just an observation.

I can't roll my Rs to save my life...and I've tried many methods...

I know you manage to play clarinet and oboe, but are there any issues concerning your bite?

Never honestly thought about it, jod! Oh, and my oboe 'playing' is both shocking and minimal...

I can't roll my Rs and have never been able to, despite lots of trying. For recorder flutter tonguing, I have to compromise with the growly throat technique! Were I preparing for a diploma in singing, I would consider informing the Board of this disability as it hardly seems fair that, as AnnC points out, my genes and regionality (East Anglian - no need for rolled Rs) would put me at a disadvantage in the exam - sounds like discrimination/disablism to me!

Many years ago, I was the pianist for a day of Opera Course auditions at a well-known music college. After a morning of hearing many and various Italian arias, the head of the panel remarked, only half-jokingly, that we could save a lot of time by just asking everyone to do a scale on a rolled rrr. If they couldn't, no way were they getting on to the Opera Course.

Sounds fair

Benjamin I live in East Anglia and have no problems rolling my rs. My husband whose lower jaw is infront of his top jaw has all sorts of problems. His home town is Norwich! The only other members of the family with similar troubles all have the same alignment of the jaw. To roll an r the top teeth are slightly in front of the back teeth.

If that can not be achieved without the jaw being relaxed, the tongue will not be relaxed and therefore the 'rrr' sound will not be forthcoming.

Are you originally from East Anglia, Jo?

I will keep working on the rolling Rs. Have just started singing lessons with a new teacher so she might be able to help!