Music Education

Learning Banjo - Easy Bluegrass Picking

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The " | " symbol will be used to represent a half step.

The frets on your banjo are laid out on half steps. When we tune a guitar to open G the barre chords wind up following the steps of a chromatic scale.

With your banjo tuned to open G a barre chord at the first fret has to be G#/Ab and a barre chord at the second fret has to be A. If you look at how this is laid out your barre chord at the fifth fret is C and at the seventh fret you get D. Since everything repeats itself after twelve frets you can get another G chord by barring across the twelfth fret.

Now rather than just using fret numbers, let's see what "Skip To My Lou" looks like with the chord names written in:

It's amazing how many chords you can make with one finger, but there are a lot of other ways to make chords. I'm going to go over a couple more songs with you using one-finger chords, but when you feel confident with that go ahead on your own and start looking for more chord forms on the Internet.

Okay, we know a two-chord song and that's cool - but now let's up the ante to three chords. I know, I know. You've got this wired now. No sweat, right?

In the next song, "Boil Them Cabbage Down" we are going to be playing barre chords just like we did with "Skip To My Lou", but now we are adding a C chord into the mix and there is one other little twist in the seventh measure.

In the seventh measure we are playing half a measure of G and half a measure of D. In order to do that we have to change the chord after "two and".

And easy way to remember when to change the chord is to make the change when your thumb plays the fourth string. I'll mark the change using the tab example of the roll: