Personally, if there are too many for me to manually pop off with my fingers (a very popular style of deadheading) I use scissors for this task. I stopped paying attention to the 5 leaf recommendation a long time ago. For delicate tasks like you mention, of groupings where some have buds or blooms I want to keep, they get nipped off individually with scissors. If the entire plant is covered with with deadheads that need to be removed without consideration for saving anything, that's when I grab my head trimmers. For 130 roses, manual deadheading in mass has become a thing of the past.

Yeah, just snap or clip off that old bloom, wait until the rest of the stem blooms, then trim down. Don't be all concerned with 5-leaflet leaf sets or 45-degree angle cuts. Blushing Knock Out gets a hedge clipper to remove old blooms.

For "pruning bar" do you mean a long-handled pruner? I don't have standards (aka, "tree"), so I woulnd't know if you woul dneed one until you see how tall the plant gets in your environment. Also, that standard will probably need to be brought inside for the winter, but that's a different thread... :-)

Good question. I usually just clip the one that's bloomed out, leaving the rest. But as harmony said, it takes more time to do than the usual deadheading of single stems...it's a bit more fiddly but if you have the time it's worth doing so the other buds can open. It's probably just not going to happen with 130 bushes!

I try to go down to the 5-leaf spot, but if the stem is getting too long, sometimes I'll go farther down.

Thanks everyone! I've never done well with roses. Though my first attempt was close to a walnut tree. So that may have been the issue. Last year we planted three ground cover roses close to make it appear a shrub. Those are amazing and I do nothing to those.

But this tree...is new to me and I would prefer to try and keep it healthy.

I was curious about is a stem got to long if one went and pruned it shorter than the 5 leaf rule. But that too was answered without my asking! (Thanks)

As to the pruning bar...I seriously do not know. I posted a topic about the rise tree and pasted a comment on winterization and it mentioned a pruning bar. Maybe it is a longer pruning device. (Which we do have) just didn't know the name of it. Wasn't sure if one must treat the harsh pruned stem ends...which is what I thought the person was saying. But I am ignorant to roses. So I could have easily mistaken what they said.

Container planting this fella...need to get a pot this weekend and put it in. The pot is so not attractive that it came in. Though a terracotta color it is...

I haven't paid any attention to the 5-leaflet rule for twenty years. It is OK (not necessarily optimal) if you have only hybrid tea roses, but harmful with some cluster-blooming roses, where it can lead you to discard half the plant unnecessarily. These are varieties that form large trusses and candelabra.

Deadheading only helps the plant if that variety sets a lot of hips (fruit), and many varieties do not. Many roses do just fine without being deadheaded.

If you want to fuss with your roses, just pop off the blooms as they fade. When the whole cluster is gone, you can either leave the branching stem tissue or cut it back some, but don't sacrifice a lot of cane unless the plant is getting too tall. The branching stem tissue is capable of producing shoots wherever there is any kind of leaf or leaflike bract. Once the rose produces new shoots, you can cut off the stem tissue above that if you want.

The only rule I follow in deadheading is to remove the minimum stem tissue until the roses gets as big as I want it to be, and to take long stems if the rose is getting too tall or floppy.

I, too, am mystified by the popularity of the old pruning rules since I have observed that growth most certainly follows the knife and when deadheading back on the cane, the rose will push out an enormous amount of fresh green non-flowering growth which will only have to be headed back later in the season or at pruning time.
The only advantage to this (I could see, in my limited experience) was an increase in photosynthesising material.....and as I rarely grow the large flowered sparsely leafed climbers....or HTs, then, this extra foliage is not really any advantage at all.