Banjo For Dummies
Overview
Here’s the quick way to get pickin’ with the best of ‘em
The banjo is both a staple of old-time music and an instrument that makes frequent cameos in today’s chart toppers. Whatever your musical leanings, Banjo For Dummies will show you how to pick your way around your instrument, even if you have zero musical background! With a little practice—and the easy-to-follow instructions in this book—you can learn your way around the banjo, try out various musical styles, and discover what banjo culture is all about.
Think of this For Dummies guide as your personal banjo tutor, as you learn how to buy, tune, hold, play, and have fun with your five-string. You can also go beyond the book with online video lessons and audio files that
will get you picking even faster. Follow the guidance of respected banjo performer Bill Evans and soon you may find yourself jamming with a band or rubbing elbows with the pros at your local bluegrass festival.
- Learn the basics of banjo: how to strum chords, pick notes, and read tablature
- Add new styles to your repertoire, including clawhammer, three-finger styles, vamping, and classic banjo
- Play bluegrass music and learn how to network at festivals
- Choose the banjo and accessories that work for you, and discover how to keep them in good shape
Banjo For Dummies is for anyone who want to learn to play the five-string banjo or brush up on banjo-playing skills. No experience required!
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About The Author
Bill Evans is an internationally celebrated five-string banjo player, teacher, historian, and recording artist, who has helped thousands of banjo players globally get the most out of their instruments. He's also performed throughout the world and his CDs have topped both folk and bluegrass charts.
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banjo for dummies
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Knowing how to interpret chord diagrams and being able to read banjo tablature, the written form of music for the banjo, will pave the way for a much smoother road ahead on all of your banjo adventures. Becoming familiar with the most important chords and essential right-hand techniques will put you in the fast lane for having more fun playing music with others.
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In the outer edge of lonesome banjo music lies “Last Chance,” a tune associated with the Saltville, Virginia, musician Hobart Smith (1897–1965).
“Last Chance” has all the eccentric qualities that old-time banjo players love: its own very unusual tuning (called “Last Chance” tuning, oddly enough), a super mournful melody, and a quirky, irregular structure that qualifies it as a crooked tune, which is defined as a song that has an uneven number of beats.
The most fun you can have with the banjo is playing music with other musicians in jam sessions. If you've never done this before, however, a few things are useful to know before you take out your banjo and start to play along. Put the following tips into practice and you'll soon be welcome at every jam session in town.
You can work up to playing the basic clawhammer strum by first getting comfortable striking individual notes. For the exercises here, use the right-hand index finger for playing melody notes (as indicated with the small letter i underneath each note in the banjo tab). However, the right-hand middle finger is an option preferred by many players.
If the banjo is the first stringed instrument you've ever attempted to play, it may seem as if you have a million things to remember at this first stage. Everything feels so new and unfamiliar.
Don't get discouraged! Banjo players tend to be perfectionists, so be careful not to let your desire to play things correctly overwhelm your love for playing (and remember that everyone learns from his or her mistakes — even banjo players).
One of the primary reasons that many people want to learn to play the banjo is to have fun making music with others in bands and in jam sessions. There's nothing quite like a banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddles, and bass grooving along to an old, lonesome-sounding ballad or burning up a hot, fast instrumental.
At a music festival, seeing amateur musicians who have never played together before open up their cases, take out their instruments, and start playing tunes together as if they've been doing it for years isn't unusual.
The left hand's job is to change the pitches of the banjo strings to get all the notes you need for chords and melodies. The left hand accomplishes this task by pressing the tips of the fingers against the fingerboard just behind a fret, as needed, to shorten the length of a string and make its pitch higher. This technique is called fretting.
The first time you discover how to fret a chord on your banjo is a very big moment in your burgeoning playing career. Whether you're blazing through a banjo breakdown or accompanying a campfire singer, chords are essential to playing the banjo.
Here, try to master the three basic chords used in thousands of songs.
Knowing how to interpret chord diagrams and being able to read banjo tablature, the written form of music for the banjo, will pave the way for a much smoother road ahead on all of your banjo adventures. Becoming familiar with the most important chords and essential right-hand techniques will put you in the fast lane for having more fun playing music with others.
Although most people (and even beginning banjo players) can establish a consistent beat in their heads, keeping that beat going while trying to play banjo is usually more difficult. That’s when a good outside source for keeping the beat can come in handy. A metronome, a device that keeps an audible steady beat for you, is a great way to play in good rhythm when practicing by yourself.
Banjo
Although you can find about as many different chord progressions as you can songs, you can count on some predictability in how chords follow one another in most songs you play on the banjo. This makes figuring out and remembering new chord progressions much easier as you encounter them in new songs.
The chord progression of a song is the part of your musical road map that indicates what chords you play, in what sequence these chords occur, and how long each chord lasts before you move on to play the next one as you play a song.
Banjo
As a new banjo player, once you master the left-hand open-string pull-off, you can use that same skill in a way that's unique to clawhammer banjo. In this new technique, the left hand is the same as what you play for an open-string pull-off, but you don't pick the string with the right hand at all. It's only the motion of your left-hand finger that creates the note.
Clawhammer banjo combines melody and rhythm in a way that makes people want to get up and dance. This playing style sounds unlike anything else in American music! The exact origin of the word clawhammer is unknown. However, the term seems to describe the desired shape of the right-hand thumb when playing this technique — mimicking the “claw” of the top part of a standard nail hammer (hence clawhammer).
The two most popular clawhammer banjo tunings are the G tuning used for “Old Joe Clark” and the double C tuning, where both the 2nd and 4th strings are tuned to a C note. You use this tuning for the old-time favorite “Soldier's Joy.”
Old-time banjo players love to employ a variety of different banjo tunings to play songs in different keys.
Double thumbing is an elaboration of the basic right-hand clawhammer banjo technique that enables you to play on the inside strings with your thumb. The ability to do this probably doesn't mean very much to you right now, but double thumbing is a commonly used technique that expands your clawhammer possibilities and comes in handy for all kinds of songs.
Banjo
The key to becoming a great banjo player is having solid timing and rhythm in your picking hand. One of the best ways to develop this ability is to practice the most frequently used patterns in clawhammer and bluegrass style, playing them over and over again until you've completely internalized them.
Here are the crucial right-hand moves you'll use just about every time you pick your banjo.
One of the things that separates music, such as you’re learning to play on a banjo, from random noise is that time is organized (in some way) within a piece of music. For now, the word rhythm refers collectively to all the different aspects of music that have to do with time and duration.
The most important aspect of playing the banjo well — both as a beginner and as an advanced player — is to play with good rhythm.
Old-time banjo isn't just clawhammer style. It also includes a wide variety of fingerpicking techniques that were played by old-time musicians before Earl Scruggs developed his bluegrass style in the mid-1940s.
Today, most old-time musicians prefer to use their bare fingers when fingerpicking rather than using the metal fingerpicks and plastic thumbpick that bluegrass players almost always use.
After you've found a good hand position, try a few exercises to get used to striking the strings in the clawhammer style. Clawhammer is very much an individualized approach to banjo playing. Even the best players play in a personalized way, doing what works best for them.
Although there are some general guidelines for you here, experiment with different ways of doing things to see what works best for you.
Although banjo players use a variety of tunings to play different kinds of songs and to create different moods on their instrument, the most frequently used tuning is called G tuning. With this tuning, the five open strings of the banjo are tuned to the notes of a G major chord (a chord is a collection of three or more notes played together).
One of the main reasons people love bluegrass banjo music is that it's so incredibly fast and loud. In order to play at those tempos that approach the speed of sound, you need to find a right-hand position that provides a stable foundation for the thumb and fingers to do all that unimaginably rapid picking.
Relaxation is key to great right-hand bluegrass technique, so remember to constantly check for tension from your shoulder to your fingertips as you work through the following steps to find a comfortable right-hand position (also refer to Bluegrass Banjo: Right-Hand Position).
Like thumbpicks for banjo playing, metal fingerpicks consist of a blade-shaped striking surface joined to a collar that holds the fingerpick around the end of the finger. You want to fit the picks on your index and middle fingers so that the striking surface is on the opposite side of your hand from your fingernail (as shown).
Bluegrass banjo players use metal fingerpicks on their right-hand index and middle fingers and a plastic thumbpick on their thumb. Initially, you may find that getting used to the feel of these picks is a struggle. It may feel like you're wearing a coat of armor over the ends of your fingers, and you may hear a lot of scratchy sounds when you first start to play.
When you’re creating a spreadsheet in Excel 2013, it’s common not to get everything in the right cells on your first try. Fortunately, moving content between cells is easy.
Here are the two methods you can use to move content:
Mouse method: Point at the dark outline around the selected range and then drag to the new location.
You take a big step up as a banjo player when you're able to create your own unique solos, using the licks and techniques that you've picked up from other songs to create new music. When playing Scruggs-style bluegrass banjo, for example, you can construct great-sounding solos by finding the song's melody notes and choosing roll patterns that include as many of those melody notes as possible.
You can edit the content of a cell in an Excel 2013 worksheet either in the cell itself or in the Formula bar. If you need to edit the content in a cell, you can
Click the cell to select it, and then click the cell again to move the insertion point into it. Edit just as you would in any text program.
Click the cell to select it and then type a new entry to replace the old one.
You will need to learn some spreadsheet basics in order to work in Excel 2013. When it’s time to actually do something, try entering some text and numbers into cells.
To type in a cell, simply select the cell and begin typing. When you finish typing, you can leave the cell in any of these ways:
Press Enter: Moves you to the next cell down.
Although the five-string banjo is by far the most popular type of banjo being played today, decades ago the most popular banjos in the first half of the 20th century were four-string tenor and plectrum banjos. These banjos are really different instruments and shouldn't be confused with the five-string banjo.
Understanding the differences between banjos is important, because before you begin your adventure, you need to make sure you're traveling with the right kind of equipment.
Banjo
Looking for an easy way to remember how to fret a banjo chord with your left-hand fingers? A chord diagram not only communicates which strings are fretted for a particular chord but also where on the fingerboard you put those fingers and which left-hand finger you use to fret each string.
Chord diagrams aren't the same as banjo tablature, which is the written form of banjo music.
To type in a cell in Excel 2013, you must first make it active by moving the cell cursor there. As shown earlier in the figure, the cell cursor is a thick green outline.
You can move the cell cursor by pressing the arrow keys on the keyboard, by clicking the desired cell, or by using one of the Excel keyboard shortcuts.
When you strike a banjo string with a right-hand finger or thumb, the string starts to move back and forth. These vibrations move through the bridge (a piece of wood positioned on the banjo head) to the banjo head, which amplifies that sound. Banjo players frequently refer to right-hand playing as picking the banjo.
Although Scruggs style uses right-hand roll patterns as the basic building blocks of banjo technique, melodic banjo is based on finding and playing scales up and down the neck.
Assigning numbers to the notes in the G-major scale
You could locate all the notes for the G-major scale on the first five frets of the banjo.
Once you have a feel for how to figure out the notes and rhythm in tab, you're ready to get acquainted with the pinch pattern. The pinch pattern gets its name from the right-hand motion you use to play the strings.
With the pinch pattern, you strike the strings with a downward motion with the thumb and with an upward motion with the right-hand index and middle fingers all at the same time.
When you feel it's time to use your new techniques to enhance your clawhammer banjo sound, attempt some favorite melodies that everyone will want to play with you at your next old-time jam session.
Some old time banjo songs to try
You can get moving with a double-thumbing workout with “Old Joe Clark” before retuning your banjo to C tuning to play the Scotch-Irish classic “Soldier's Joy.
The banjo classic “Coal Creek March” is usually played in D tuning, where the banjo is tuned to the pitches of a D major chord. This tuning is also used by bluegrass players, so it's definitely worth checking out.
Like Dock Boggs, Kentucky and Ohio banjo player Pete Steele worked in the coal mines. His classic “Coal Creek March” was recorded in 1938 by folklorist Alan Lomax and has been an old-time fingerpicking standard ever since.
You can print your work in Excel 2013 on paper to share with people who may not have computer access or to pass out as handouts at meetings and events. You can print the quick-and-easy way with the default settings or customize the settings to fit your needs.
By default, when you print Excel prints the entire active worksheet — that is, whichever worksheet is displayed or selected at the moment.
If you're already familiar with reading chord diagrams for the guitar, you’ll find that banjo players use the same system. If you turn your banjo around so that the fingerboard faces you, that's how the banjo neck is represented in a chord diagram (check out the figure to more fully break down the parts of a chord diagram):
From left to right, the vertical lines represent the 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st strings on your banjo.
Tablature (or tab for short) is the written form of music for the banjo. Although tablature uses quite a few elements that are also found in conventional music notation, tab imparts information that's specific to the banjo, such as what string you play and whether that string is open or fretted. Tablature is a part of almost every instructional book and CD set.
Banjo tablature expresses rhythm in much the same way as it's read in conventional music notation, in terms of measures and time signatures. Banjo players typically think of a single measure of tab in 4/4 time as a rhythmic space that's waiting to be filled by a maximum of eight notes (or an equivalent combination of fewer notes with longer duration).
Range names in Excel 2013 are written with the upper-left cell address, a colon, and the lower-right cell address, as in the example A1:F3. Here A1:F3 means the range that begins in the upper-left corner with A1 and ends in the lower-right corner with F3.
When a range contains noncontiguous cells, the pieces are separated by commas, like this: B8:C14,D8:G14.
How you hold your banjo while sitting down is determined by how much you need to see the banjo fingerboard while you're playing. Some players use the position dots on the top side of the banjo neck to keep track of where they are on the banjo neck and don't actually look at the fingerboard directly at all, but most players prefer to actually see what their flying fretting fingers are doing.
The key to being comfortable while standing with the banjo is to adopt a position that's similar to the position you use when sitting. If you've found a good sitting position, stand up with the banjo and watch what happens. Try adjusting the strap length so that you have little to no change in the position of the banjo for both your sitting and standing positions.
You've probably already discovered that banjos can be heavy. Even if you have a more lightweight, open-back banjo, the distribution of weight on your banjo may very well be uneven, with much of the mass at the peghead concentrated where the four tuning pegs are located.
Take a moment and sit in a chair with your banjo in a playing position, with the pot of the banjo resting on your legs and the neck extending to your left at about a 45-degree angle.
Banjo
If you don't have an electronic tuner or you want your banjo to be in tune with others in a jam session, you can use pitches from other instruments to get your banjo where it needs to be. In general, ask another musician to play a certain note on her instrument. Then, try to get your string to match that pitch by turning the tuning pegs.
Tuners provide a reference point for you to tune individual strings one at a time. These days, a tuner is pretty much an essential accessory to carry with you wherever you take your banjo.
When you play a string, the tuner “hears” the note and gives an indication of the note's pitch by showing a letter name for the note closest to it in pitch, with an accompanying ♯ (sharp) or ♭ó (flat) sign, if needed (for instance, if the note you're playing is closest to an F♯ in pitch, the tuner reads F♯).
Functions in Excel 2013 perform complex math operations on cell content. Here is how you can insert a function in a cell, and a list of some common, useful functions.
Inserting a function in a cell
Typing a function and its arguments directly into a cell works fine if you happen to know the function you want and its arguments.
Banjo
Excel 2013 makes it easy to insert and delete rows and columns to deal with many kinds of changes. Even if you’re a careful planner, you’ll likely decide that you want to change your worksheet’s structure. Maybe you want data in a different column, or certain rows turn out to be unnecessary.When you insert a new row or column, the existing ones move to make room for it.
Lead playing on your banjo has to do with those times when you're the center of attention in your band or during a jam session. If you're playing a well-known banjo instrumental like “Cripple Creek” or “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” you'll probably start the song by setting the tempo and playing all the way through the tune one time before handing off the lead to the next willing instrumentalist.
Scruggs-style banjo playing is based around creating music that uniquely combines the elements of left-hand slides, hammer-ons, and pull-offs to the right-hand roll patterns. As you listen to and play pieces in this style, you may begin to notice short phrases that appear in more than one tune. These phrases, called licks, are the building blocks of Scruggs-style banjo.
Banjo players just love to play haunting, lonesome tunes, often called modal tunes, that sound like something that's just emerged from some deep Appalachian mountain holler. Old-time musicians have come up with a tuning that's perfect for capturing the special quality of these songs. In preparation for playing the clawhammer classic “Cluck Old Hen,” you need to get your banjo into modal tuning.
In Excel 2013 you can move and copy text and numbers between cells, but when it comes to copying formulas, beware of a few gotchas. The following sections explain relative and absolute referencing in formulas and how you can use them to get the results you want when you copy.
Copy formulas with relative referencing
When you move or copy a formula, Excel automatically changes the cell references to work with the new location.
Banjo
These days, bluegrass banjo isn't limited to the dazzling roll-based approach created by Earl Scruggs in the 1940s and 1950s. Bluegrass banjo today also includes the melodic innovations of Bill Keith and Bobby Thompson (from the 1960s) along with the single-string techniques blazed by Eddie Adcock and Don Reno (in the 1950s and '60s), which have been taken to new heights of virtuosity more recently by modern players like Béla Fleck and Noam Pikelny.
As you gain confidence playing licks on your banjo and combining them to create longer phrases, you eventually want to use the licks you know to create and enhance the melodies of songs. The following two tunes show you just how you can do this.
“Everyday Breakdown”
Because this song is made up of a number of essential two-measure phrases commonly used for the G, C, and D chords, “Everyday Breakdown” can get you started in your quest to create longer phrases and play entire songs by combining licks.
The vertical lines on a banjo chord diagram represent the 4th through the 1st strings of your banjo, moving from left to right — as if you were looking down on the fingerboard of your instrument from above. The horizontal lines are the frets on your banjo, with the top line corresponding to the banjo nut. The dark circles represent fretted positions, with left-hand fingering indicated at the bottom of the diagram.
Much of Scruggs-style banjo playing is based around roll patterns — right-hand sequences of notes that crop up again and again when playing in this style. Roll patterns are made up of eight notes played by the right-hand thumb, index, and middle fingers.
As a general rule, you use a different right-hand finger to strike a different string for each consecutive note when playing a roll pattern (in other words, you don't want to use the same right-hand finger or hit the same string twice in a row).
Banjo
Of all of the parts you can easily swap out and upgrade on your banjo, bridges and heads can make the biggest difference in sound. Your banjo is a combination of wood and metal held together with nuts, bolts, screws, and glue. Because it's much easier to exchange parts on a banjo than it is on a guitar or mandolin, it's not unusual for banjo players who like to tinker with things to try out different banjo parts in search of adding that extra edge to the sound of their instrument.
Many folks prepare for a trip to a foreign country by practicing a few phrases in the language that's spoken there. Playing the banjo is very much the same kind of adventure — it's great to know banjo speak before you start to make banjo music.
Although that banjo-playing kid in the Deliverance movie didn't talk very much, it's still helpful to familiarize yourself with the following basic banjo terms:
Left hand: Any instructions regarding the left hand refer to the hand you use to push the strings against the fingerboard to make chords (you do this with the tips of your fingers, of course, not the entire hand).
Banjo
One of the raging controversies in the bluegrass banjo world over the last several decades is whether it’s best to anchor the right hand with both the ring and pinky fingers or whether it’s alright to anchor with just the pinky finger.
Most beginning players have trouble keeping the ring finger anchored on the head, especially when playing a note with the middle right-hand finger.
The neck is one of the two main sections of the banjo (the pot being the other). The neck is the long piece of wood that supports the strings and tuners. Necks are usually made of maple, mahogany, or walnut.
To get a better feel for the banjo, take a look at the parts of the banjo neck:
Frets: The thin, metal bars on the banjo neck that are positioned at precise intervals to give you the various pitches needed when fretting a string.
Excel 2013 is very much like Word and other Office applications. Excel has a File tab that opens a Backstage view, a Ribbon with multiple tabs that contain commands you can click to execute, a Quick Access toolbar, a status bar, scroll bars, and a Zoom slider. This figure provides a quick overview.
These instructions walk you through the Excel interface and show you how to move around.
Tablature is the written form of music for the banjo. While it looks much like conventional music, tablature provides banjo-specific information, such as what string you play and whether the string is open or fretted.
The five horizontal lines represent the five strings of your banjo, with the top line corresponding to the 1st string and the bottom representing the 5th string.
The two most popular banjo playing styles in the world today are clawhammer (also called frailing) and bluegrass. Each of these styles uses a different right-hand position as well as a different way of striking the strings. Although most players tend to specialize in either one or the other style, you should try both approaches right from the start.
Math. Excel 2013 is really good at it, and it’s what makes Excel more than just data storage. Even if you hated math in school, you might still like Excel because it does the math for you.
In Excel, you can write math formulas that perform calculations on the values in various cells, and then, if those values change later, you can see the formula results update automatically.
Using a style in Word 2013 makes it easy to apply consistent formatting throughout a document. A style is a named set of formatting specifications. For example, you might apply the Heading 1 style to all headings in the document and the Normal style to all the regular body text. Here are the advantages of this approach:
Ease: Applying a style is easier than manually applying formatting.
Old-time banjo is the fastest growing banjo style on the planet for lots of good reasons. The basic techniques are easy and fun to learn, and it's a great way to play the banjo while singing.
In old-time music, which usually combines the sound of the banjo with the fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, everyone often plays melodies at the same time, and this allows players of different experience levels to sound great together.
Although Scruggs style is just about the most logical and ingenious technique ever created to play music on the banjo, you unfortunately can't play everything in this way. Because you strike a different string with each roll note in Scruggs style, playing note-for-note versions of a melody that happens to contain lots of consecutive notes adjacent to one another is the one thing that's next to impossible using Scruggs style.
Pete Seeger has been getting people excited about playing the banjo for over 70 years now. He's one of the most eclectic banjo players on the planet, playing a wide variety of music from all over the world on the instrument.
In 1948, he authored the first-ever banjo instructional book, How to Play the 5-String Banjo, and this amazing book (published by Pete himself) is still in print today.
Relative tuning involves using one string as a reference to tune the other strings of your banjo. That string doesn't really have to be in tune with any outside source, because in this case, you're just getting the banjo strings in tune with one another so that you can play by yourself.
With each new string you tune in relative tuning, you then fret that string to create a new reference note that you use to tune the next highest string.
Bluegrass-style banjo originated with the innovations of Earl Scruggs, who burst upon the national scene in the mid-1940s. The bluegrass style is characterized by a flurry of fast, brilliant-sounding notes and is the sound behind all-time banjo classics such as Scruggs’ “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and “Dueling Banjos.
The two major sections of the banjo are the neck (the long piece of wood supporting the strings and tuners) and the pot, the round lower body of the banjo including all of its constituent parts. You can see some of the following parts highlighted in the figure:
Head: The head is the plastic or skin membrane that acts as the vibrating top of the banjo.
Relative tuning for your banjo is great when you're playing by yourself or for quickly touching up a string or two in the middle of a practice session. However, when playing with others (or with audio or video tracks), you need to get accustomed to tuning your banjo using one or more outside reference notes as provided by an electronic tuner or another instrument.
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