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Now with your forearm of your picking had resting lightly on the armrest -or, if you are like me and just hate armrests you can rest your forearm right on the edge of the tension hoop. I like working without an armrest because I can use the meat of my forearm on the banjo head to change the tone of the instrument while I'm playing. You can do this to get a softer sound or, if you mess around with it a bit, you can get a sort of wah-wah or rotating speaker effect . . .was I? Oh yeah, with your arm resting lightly on the rim or the armrest drop your hand down so that your thumb is on the fifth string, your index and middle fingers are on the first and second string and either your ring or little finger (or both) is/are resting on the head to steady your hand.
Notice I left the right, little or both option up to you - and also notice that I said to "support" your hand. You don't have to apply any pressure on your banjo head. Just keep things light and kind of loose.
Got that? Cool, we're almost ready to boogie, but first we have to talk a little bit about rhythm.
Rather than talk about rhythm, let's actually experience it together. What I want you to do is to tap your foot on the floor four times.
No, we're not doing an impression of an old Roy Rogers and Trigger routine. There is a method to my madness here so just trust me and tap your foot four times.
Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .tap.
That was easy enough, right? Now we're going to do the same thing but count out loud each time we tap. Count, "one" as your foot hits the floor for the first time. Bring your foot back up and then tap again and count," two". Keep that going until you get to four.
One two three four Tap tap tap tap
Now keep repeating that a few times. Count on each tap and after four go back to "one". Try to keep the space between each tap the same.
What you are doing here is playing a quarter note rhythm in 4/4 time.
No, really. I'm not making this up, that's really what you are doing here.
In music everything from the notes you play to the rests where you don't play anything has a time value attached to it. That time value is defined as rhythm. Without rhythm the notes would have no context and everything would just come out like noise.
We break music up into measures with a specific number of beats. A beat is the term we use to describe the pulse of the music. The number of beats in a measure is dictated by the time signature.
The time signature tells us how many beats are played in a measure or group of measures. A time signature like 4/4 indicates that we will play four beats to a measure (4/) and that each beat will have the value of a quarter note