Andy Chase

Well, for all of my bluster a week and a half ago, I haven't really gotten on track with my three-finger banjo practice. I've been playing almost every day, but still in a fairly unfocused manner.

I first went back to the Scruggs book, thinking I'd work my way through exercise by exercise, learning The Official Way To Play Banjo so I'll have a good foundation wherever I go next. There are some good exercises building up to the arrangement of Cripple Creek from Flatt & Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Banjo album, but as Steve Martin will tell you, you reach a point where you really don't want to play Cripple Creek any more. It was the first song I learned in the clawhammer style four years ago, and one of the first I learned in the Scruggs style two years ago. I'm kind of tired of playing it, especially knowing that even if I work on it until I can play the Scruggs breaks impeccably, anyone else I play with is going to be sick of that song, too.

Last week I got an arrangement of 8th of January for my guitar class, a tune that burrowed its way deep into my head and demanded to be practiced on guitar, sapping some of my banjo energy. However, I got to tinkering one night last week and put together a surprisingly easy melodic-style arrangement of the tune for 5-String banjo, in open C tuning capoed up two frets (aDAC#E.) (Side note: Tabledit is an invaluable tool for this.)

The thing I find with melodic arrangements on banjo is that they are intellectually cool, but they just feel like the most ass-backwards way to go about playing a melody on a stringed instrument; when playing an instrument with a flat pick the progression is clear: play up the frets for one position, then move up to the next string, repeat. When playing melodic-style on banjo, you're often doing things like playing an open, higher string then playing a lower string fretted up at the 5th or 7th fret, then jumping up two strings and doing the same thing. This lets the melody ring smoothly while picking with three fingers, and once you get it down the notes fall into the right place but it's incredibly difficult to "feel" what the next note is when it's 7 frets away on a different string.

Single-string, or Don Reno style is a little bit better, but picking down with the thumb and up with the index finger feels silly and unnatural... especially when you know how natural it feels to play the same type of passage with a flat pick.

For example, here is the tablature for a G scale as you would play it single-string style:

D|----------------0---2---4---5---|4---2---0-----------------------|

B|--------0---1-------------------|------------1---0---------------|

G|0---2---------------------------|--------------------2---0-------|

D|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|

g|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|

Even if you don't play a stringed instrument, the progession is visually clear. Here's the same exact scale in the melodic style:

D|----------------0-------4-------|4-------0-----------------------|

B|--------0-----------5-----------|----5-----------0---------------|

G|0-----------5-------------------|------------5-----------0-------|

D|----7---------------------------|--------------------7-----------|

g|----------------------------0---|--------------------------------|

In both cases, it seems like you're making extra work for yourself. I know the reason behind both styles is that it still leaves you with the ability to play the three-finger rolls and pinches that make Scruggs style banjo so distinctive, but it's hard to get a feel for it.

I was fooling around with some basic G major and G major pentatonic scales in both Reno and melodic styles tonight, and realized that much of my frustration lies with the fact that you can memorize how to play a scale, but not really know what you're playing; carefully arranged melodic passages fall apart if you miss a note or a beat, and unless you really know the scale and its relationship to the fretboard you don't have a hope of getting back on track if you flub it.

And needless to say, knowing the theory behind scale construction and knowing the fretboard is absolutely essential to improvisation.

So to become a well-rounded three-finger style banjo player I need to work on technique, (which will hopefully be a byproduct of rote repetition) and I need to really learn my instrument, not just how to memorize songs on it.

This is not a really a new revelation; I've had my copy of Edly's Music Theory for Practical People for two years now, and I have gleaned a lot from it in terms of calculating the I-IV-V chords of a particular key in my head on the fly, transposing tunes, building scales and chords, et cetera... but I've used the book more like a reference than a study. I need to know these things cold without consulting a book, and I need to know how they map to the banjo fretboard, forward and backward with my eyes closed.

I should probably also stop putting it off and learn to read standard musical notation. This is not exactly fun stuff, but if nothing else it is the sort of stuff that makes it easy to mark progress.