A Musical Entry, and Don't You Try to Say Otherwise
This past April, ACT sent me to observe classes in Oklahoma City, and I came back with a banjo. To be precise, a practical banjo. I already owned one instrument, which I've had since college. It's a top-of-the-line Alvarez; gorgeous but with a solid wood resonator and a lot of brass, and that sucker is about ten pounds heavy, which is a burden on your shoulder.
When I was in graduate school, I took a few months of lessons from Bob Black, a terrific local banjo player, but I didn't stick with it. Bob was going through some stressors in his life at the time, and he couldn't be counted on to show up during lesson times.
And so I've carried around a pretty heavy instrument that I never quite learned to play well, moving it from Iowa City to Dyersville, from Minneapolis to Eagan, and back ...
And then I bought this little beginner's instrument from the American Banjo Museum, and (another) beginner's book. I spent an enjoyable week re-learning banjo in the hotel room, and this new instrument is compact enough that I keep it in my locker at work, and practice for a half-hour every day at lunch, as well as a half-hour in the morning and another half-hour or so in the evenings.
And after four months, I'm getting to the point of being mediocre.
Which is to say, I've finished the book I bought, the inaccurately-titled "You Can Teach Yourself to Play Banjo". (If you could, you wouldn't need the book, yes?) I'm not sure I can recommend it to people who've never played banjo before. (The link is to the amazon website for the book, which includes a number of the dry instructional-text pages; you can see for yourself if the author's descriptions make sense to you.) But for someone with a few lessons in his past, it worked pretty well.
A couple of basics everybody should know about the modern 5-string banjo: it's usually tuned in open-G, with a high G string, then low-to-high D, G, B, D. (The lowest three strings are at the same pitches as the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd strings on a guitar.) For maybe a century, the standard style of playing was "frailing" or "clawhammer." (If you want to see an example, or a quick lesson, YouTube will serve you well.) In the 1950's Don Reno started playing melodic runs on the instrument, which was an innovation, but there's a catch: because of the acoustic properties of the instrument, playing several adjacent notes on the same string comes off as staccato, very sharp and clear and divided with little bits of silence in between. If that's not the feel you're trying for, Reno's work wouldn't help. (By the way, I can't seem to find a reasonable website for a link to Reno's biography or history; every site I looked through is embroiled in warfare over just which player did what and when and influenced whom. Even Wikipedia.)
About the same time, Earl Scruggs developed a three-finger style that incorporated a lot of two-finger patterns he'd learned as a boy. That's the archetypical "bluegrass banjo" style you hear on the Ballad of Jed Clampett, on Foggy Mountain Breakdown from the movie Bonnie & Clyde, on Dueling Banjos, and so on. It's lightning-fast, and it gets around the staccato problem by spending most of the time playing running-eighth-note arpeggio rolls, with some melody notes thrown in. Scruggs is still around, still playing, and by all accounts one of the nicest guys in the music business, both in demeanor and in how far he'll go to help out some other player.
A young man named Bill Keith took the trouble to listen and study under Scruggs and actually transcribe all of those pieces, eighth-note-by-eighth-note, producing the Earl Scruggs banjo instruction manual. In the process, Keith developed his own style, which used an alternating system of open strings and adjacent fretted strings to play melodies which avoided playing two notes on the same string. For example, a G scale in the Keith system plays:
When I took lessons, my instructor had a clear preference for melodic-style.
The author of "You Can Teach Yourself to Play Banjo", Janet Davis, starts simple and moves through introductory material with an eye towards getting the student inducted into the world of bluegrass musicians. She spends a few pages talking about back-up playing, and indicates that, for example, certain songs are usually played up a full step with a capo. And the repertoire she teaches is a nice mix of basic songs that any novice ought to have under his belt, with some really cool surprises: "Grandfather's Clock" (Lesson 34) is the example piece for harmonics, and it's just a delight. When she talks about pieces in 3/4 time, one of her examples is "Silent Night" (Lesson 56), in the key of C. She is comfortable with both Scruggs-style and melodic style playing, and once she teaches both styles, moves back and forth between them.
And so, after working through that book, I bought a few others. One was on playing backup banjo in a band. Another was on how to play lead lines. Another was on jazz theory with the banjo. And one was "Irish and Celtic 5-string Banjo, which is more controversial than I'd thought.
See, around 1910, Gibson Music Company started making a short-necked four-string banjo which was tuned in fifths like a vioa / mandola, which they called a "tenor banjo". That's the instrument that caught on in Dixieland bands, that's the instrument that Eddie Peabody, "The King of the Banjo" played. And that's the instrument which was retuned down a fourth, to match the tuning for the octave mandolin / Irish bouzuki, and become a staple playing Celtic fiddle tunes.
Much to the regret of the American Banjo Museum, which houses the "Four-String Banjo Hall-of-Fame," I don't play the tenor banjo. It uses a flat pick, instead of fingerpicks. It's tuned all different from the instrument I know. It has a resonant drumhead for a body, which makes it a banjo, but that's the big similarity. If you play violin or mandolin, you already know how to play a tenor banjo.
So, this guy, Tom Hanway, decided to bring a 5-string to Irish sessions. I suspect he also brought some attitude and some social awkwardness. The first 39 pages of this book is a several-chapter-long essay, explaining the justification of why we should be allowed to play Celtic music on a 5-string banjo. As somebody who is just fine playing plastic recorders with an autoharp and a 'cello, I skipped to page 40 and started in.
And I'm kind of disappointed. This book will be more work than I'd expected.
Banjo books are written in tabulature, rather than classical notes. As you can tell by the Keith-style scale, the string you choose to use for a note is pretty important. And Hanway's book violates Melodic style rules, frequently, for no good reason. For exammple, one of the first songs in the book is the Irish Washerwoman". And Hanway plays the melody as a series of notes all on the first string: "9(th fret) - 5(th fret) - 5 - 0 - 5 - 5 - 9 - 5 - 9 - 9 - 7 - 5 ..." while there's a perfectly good open 5th string there, tuned to that 5th-fret on the first string, and the 8th fret of the 2nd string is also a G. So that follderoll could be played as an elegant roll with fingers on the first string, 9th fret, and the second string, 8th fret. And I don't think he's trying for that staccato effect.
I've only been playing for four months. Hanway is much more experienced than I am. But I think he's also familiar with tenor banjo, and letting some of that technique spill over into his arrangements for this music. I'll press on through another dozen pieces, and then either figure out what he's trying to do, or set the book aside for a while.
(Musicians for the Minnesota Renaissance Festival will be amused, perhaps, that both "John Ryan's Polka" and "Dennis Murphey's Polka," two pieces we play for Opening Gate, are in the book. Nothing says 'Renaissance Festival' like a banjo.)
When I was in graduate school, I took a few months of lessons from Bob Black, a terrific local banjo player, but I didn't stick with it. Bob was going through some stressors in his life at the time, and he couldn't be counted on to show up during lesson times.
And so I've carried around a pretty heavy instrument that I never quite learned to play well, moving it from Iowa City to Dyersville, from Minneapolis to Eagan, and back ...
And then I bought this little beginner's instrument from the American Banjo Museum, and (another) beginner's book. I spent an enjoyable week re-learning banjo in the hotel room, and this new instrument is compact enough that I keep it in my locker at work, and practice for a half-hour every day at lunch, as well as a half-hour in the morning and another half-hour or so in the evenings.
And after four months, I'm getting to the point of being mediocre.
Which is to say, I've finished the book I bought, the inaccurately-titled "You Can Teach Yourself to Play Banjo". (If you could, you wouldn't need the book, yes?) I'm not sure I can recommend it to people who've never played banjo before. (The link is to the amazon website for the book, which includes a number of the dry instructional-text pages; you can see for yourself if the author's descriptions make sense to you.) But for someone with a few lessons in his past, it worked pretty well.
A couple of basics everybody should know about the modern 5-string banjo: it's usually tuned in open-G, with a high G string, then low-to-high D, G, B, D. (The lowest three strings are at the same pitches as the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd strings on a guitar.) For maybe a century, the standard style of playing was "frailing" or "clawhammer." (If you want to see an example, or a quick lesson, YouTube will serve you well.) In the 1950's Don Reno started playing melodic runs on the instrument, which was an innovation, but there's a catch: because of the acoustic properties of the instrument, playing several adjacent notes on the same string comes off as staccato, very sharp and clear and divided with little bits of silence in between. If that's not the feel you're trying for, Reno's work wouldn't help. (By the way, I can't seem to find a reasonable website for a link to Reno's biography or history; every site I looked through is embroiled in warfare over just which player did what and when and influenced whom. Even Wikipedia.)
About the same time, Earl Scruggs developed a three-finger style that incorporated a lot of two-finger patterns he'd learned as a boy. That's the archetypical "bluegrass banjo" style you hear on the Ballad of Jed Clampett, on Foggy Mountain Breakdown from the movie Bonnie & Clyde, on Dueling Banjos, and so on. It's lightning-fast, and it gets around the staccato problem by spending most of the time playing running-eighth-note arpeggio rolls, with some melody notes thrown in. Scruggs is still around, still playing, and by all accounts one of the nicest guys in the music business, both in demeanor and in how far he'll go to help out some other player.
A young man named Bill Keith took the trouble to listen and study under Scruggs and actually transcribe all of those pieces, eighth-note-by-eighth-note, producing the Earl Scruggs banjo instruction manual. In the process, Keith developed his own style, which used an alternating system of open strings and adjacent fretted strings to play melodies which avoided playing two notes on the same string. For example, a G scale in the Keith system plays:
- third string open (low G)
- fourth string, 7th fret (A)
- second string open (B)
- third string, fifth fret (C)
- first string open(D)
- second string, 5th fret (E)
- first string, 4th fret (F#)
- fifth string open (high G)
When I took lessons, my instructor had a clear preference for melodic-style.
The author of "You Can Teach Yourself to Play Banjo", Janet Davis, starts simple and moves through introductory material with an eye towards getting the student inducted into the world of bluegrass musicians. She spends a few pages talking about back-up playing, and indicates that, for example, certain songs are usually played up a full step with a capo. And the repertoire she teaches is a nice mix of basic songs that any novice ought to have under his belt, with some really cool surprises: "Grandfather's Clock" (Lesson 34) is the example piece for harmonics, and it's just a delight. When she talks about pieces in 3/4 time, one of her examples is "Silent Night" (Lesson 56), in the key of C. She is comfortable with both Scruggs-style and melodic style playing, and once she teaches both styles, moves back and forth between them.
And so, after working through that book, I bought a few others. One was on playing backup banjo in a band. Another was on how to play lead lines. Another was on jazz theory with the banjo. And one was "Irish and Celtic 5-string Banjo, which is more controversial than I'd thought.
See, around 1910, Gibson Music Company started making a short-necked four-string banjo which was tuned in fifths like a vioa / mandola, which they called a "tenor banjo". That's the instrument that caught on in Dixieland bands, that's the instrument that Eddie Peabody, "The King of the Banjo" played. And that's the instrument which was retuned down a fourth, to match the tuning for the octave mandolin / Irish bouzuki, and become a staple playing Celtic fiddle tunes.
Much to the regret of the American Banjo Museum, which houses the "Four-String Banjo Hall-of-Fame," I don't play the tenor banjo. It uses a flat pick, instead of fingerpicks. It's tuned all different from the instrument I know. It has a resonant drumhead for a body, which makes it a banjo, but that's the big similarity. If you play violin or mandolin, you already know how to play a tenor banjo.
So, this guy, Tom Hanway, decided to bring a 5-string to Irish sessions. I suspect he also brought some attitude and some social awkwardness. The first 39 pages of this book is a several-chapter-long essay, explaining the justification of why we should be allowed to play Celtic music on a 5-string banjo. As somebody who is just fine playing plastic recorders with an autoharp and a 'cello, I skipped to page 40 and started in.
And I'm kind of disappointed. This book will be more work than I'd expected.
Banjo books are written in tabulature, rather than classical notes. As you can tell by the Keith-style scale, the string you choose to use for a note is pretty important. And Hanway's book violates Melodic style rules, frequently, for no good reason. For exammple, one of the first songs in the book is the Irish Washerwoman". And Hanway plays the melody as a series of notes all on the first string: "9(th fret) - 5(th fret) - 5 - 0 - 5 - 5 - 9 - 5 - 9 - 9 - 7 - 5 ..." while there's a perfectly good open 5th string there, tuned to that 5th-fret on the first string, and the 8th fret of the 2nd string is also a G. So that follderoll could be played as an elegant roll with fingers on the first string, 9th fret, and the second string, 8th fret. And I don't think he's trying for that staccato effect.
I've only been playing for four months. Hanway is much more experienced than I am. But I think he's also familiar with tenor banjo, and letting some of that technique spill over into his arrangements for this music. I'll press on through another dozen pieces, and then either figure out what he's trying to do, or set the book aside for a while.
(Musicians for the Minnesota Renaissance Festival will be amused, perhaps, that both "John Ryan's Polka" and "Dennis Murphey's Polka," two pieces we play for Opening Gate, are in the book. Nothing says 'Renaissance Festival' like a banjo.)