Andy Chase

I'm beginning to think that everything I know about 3-finger style banjo is wrong.

More specifically, I think the preponderance of information about technique and learning approaches is very limited in perspective, and counter-productive to really learning the instrument; everything revolves around playing like Earl Scruggs, and pretty much any beginning banjo instruction zeroes right in on Practicing The Holy Roll patterns. (raise your hand if you're sick of these: Forward Roll, Backwards Roll, Forward-Reverse Roll, Foggy Mountain Roll, Thumb-in-and-out) Practice the rolls over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, and then practice them some more. Practice them until you can do them in your sleep.

The reason for the sacred rolls as I've read it is that when people sat down to try and figure out how in the hell Earl plays like he plays, they noticed a number of common picking patterns. These patterns were quickly (and somewhat incorrectly, I think) written in stone as the basis of all bluegrass-style banjo playing. I haven't delved very much into the Earl Scruggs tab book yet, but from what little I've seen Earl's arrangements don't feel like they have much to do with these rolls; they feel much more like a lot of the rock tunes I learned when I took electric guitar lessons. That is to say, the notes are arranged the way Earl picked them off the fretboard when he was first working the tunes up. The fact that some common patterns emerge is secondary.

Bluegrass banjo books have it the other way around; "Learn the rolls first, and then you'll be able to play like Earl." It's rather boring, and it doesn't really encourage experimentation because it doesn't really give you any idea of how to go about experimenting; you just wind up vamping over some chords with the same old rolls, and throwing in the same old licks from the tab.

I need some things:

1. Pat Cloud's Key to 5-String Banjo.
2. Some real Béla Fleck tab (as arranged by the man himself, not fans' best guesses)
3. I need to finish working through Edly's Music Theory for Practical People, and find some more books on theory and composition that go beyond the I-IV-V chord patterns used by about 90% of the old-time/bluegrass standards.
4. I need a license of Tabledit, so I can start to develop a more innate sense if how melodies map to the banjo fretboard.
5. Time, time, time.

I might also need to stop reading the Banjo Hangout forums for a while. Sometimes it seems like there's so much energy dedicated to discussing the right way to play the foggy mountain roll, or whether it's ok to NOT anchor both your ring finger and pinky on the head, or the endless hardware tinkering and daydreaming about prewar Gibson banjos. So many things that have been discussed to death, with new threads started daily. As much as banjo players kvetch about the Deliverance stereotype, a lot of them do plenty to make sure the instrument remains widely associated with its rural roots.

Tagged:

• banjo
• musictheory
• technique
• earlscruggs
• belafleck