Andy Chase

I haven't been playing much over the last few weeks. Not clawhammer banjo, not three-finger banjo, not mandolin, not ukulele.

At a bare minimum I should absolutely be practicing guitar for the group class I'm taking, but I've been lax there as well, and it shows during class.

I think it's a symptom of a few different things. Let me get the easy one out of the way first: Getting home from work late. That's a bit of a cop-out, since I could always set aside some time to practice before work/over lunch/et cetera.

The harder ones are questions of short-term goals:

If I can browbeat myself into religiously devoting at least 30 minutes a day to banjo/guitar/mandolin, what aspects of technique am I hoping to improve?

and long-term goals:

If I'm true to those hypothetical short term goals and spend at least 182.5 hours practicing over the next year, what am I hoping to do with those improvements?

and picking a discipline:

Donald Zepp makes me want to practice clawhammer banjo until I can play like that. Béla Fleck makes me want to practice 3-finger banjo until I can play like that. Chris Thile makes me want to take mandolin lessons.

Pretty much every musical method book I've paged through stresses the importance of setting those short-term goals (be able to play the forward roll at 180bps, be able to play Foggy Mountain Breakdown at full speed), but that sort of assumes you already know what your long-term goals are, even if they're as vague as "playing in a bluegrass band."

My problem is that after almost four years of hanging around the alt.banjo.* groups on usenet and the BanjoHangout web site, I don't think I want to play in a traditional "that ain't the way Earl plays that break, play it right son" bluegrass band - every musical genre has its purists, but compared to my days of comparing notes with other casual rock guitarists, banjo players are insane.

The fact is that I'm not a huge fan of dyed in the wool bluegrass. The nasally, twangy vocals that accompany most acts are like fingernails on chalkboard to me, and there's way too much obsession with "authenticity". There was a long, contentious thread on BanjoHangout a while back that was started by someone complaining about performers at some festival not tucking their shirts in. There are multiple discussion topics about whether it's OK to play the foggy mountain roll using thumb-index thumb-index instead of thumb-index thumb-middle.

Thanks, but no thanks.

On the other hand, I'm a huge fan of the musicians who have outgrown the boundaries of traditional oldtime/bluegrass music without abandoning the instrumentation; Béla Fleck, Tony Rice (guitar), David Grisman (mandolin), Edgar Meyer (bass), and plenty of others... for me it's about the music, not about a concept of 'good old time bluegrass' that's really more of a world view about tradition/simpler times/the-way-things-ought-to-be of which the music happens to be a component.

Setting aside the fact that all of my favorite acoustic musicians are virtuosi and the knowledge that realistically I will probably never, ever approach that level of mastery, my other source of frustration is experiental. I grew up in New England listening to my Parents' 1960s jazz and pop-rock, and my brother's 1970's rock. The only childhood exposure to banjo that I can remember was the guy playing tenor or plectrum at a Shakey's pizza in Maryland in the late 1970's, when I would have been 4 or 5; that planted the banjo seed, but otherwise I grew up with all of the typical cultural cues about banjo as a redneck/hillbilly/country instrument, and because of my absolute loathing of modern country-pop I spent 28 years of my life completely unaware of old-time music and all those great instrumental fiddle tunes. Like a lot of people, it wasn't until I saw O Brother, Where Art Thou? that I became aware of old-time music, and realized to my surprise that I liked it.

That led to the purchase of my first banjo and some lessons, and Béla Fleck's Tales From the Acoustic Planet Volume II: The Bluegrass Sessions was my foot in the door to the world of instrumental bluegrass that eventually led me to take some lessons in the three-finger style, and to acquire a mandolin.

It's been almost four years since I got my first banjo, and I have barely scratched the surface of the oldtime/bluegrass universe... I've still never heard a lot of the 'must have' records, and for every traditional tune I know like Cripple Creek or Old Joe Clark, there are half a dozen I don't. It's not like rock guitar, where 31 years of constant radio and household exposure makes it easy to hack around and bang out some power chords or licks that sound like I know what I'm doing. If I decide I want to learn a new song on banjo, I don't usually have that benefit of having heard the melody so often throughout my life that it's half-learned already. So there's the lack of cultural context... but I'm not going to be too hard on myself when I haven't even been listening to this stuff for four years yet.

The other reason I'm treading water is that I'm trying to go in too many directions at once, and I've been reluctant to settle on an instrument and willfully setting aside the others for a year or two until playing the one instrument is like riding a bike. Again, it's been less than four years and I've been tinkering with two styles of banjo, mandolin, and acoustic guitar... I shouldn't beat myself up over it, but I should make a conscious decision to focus on one thing in a disciplined fashion for a while, and see where it takes me.

Tagged:

• music
• practice
• banjo
• guitar
• mandolin
• ukulele
• frustration