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No, you really won't wind up sounding just like anybody else- but you will wind up sounding like yourself.
Most of the folks reading this will have spent, hopefully, at least a little bit of time working on some kind of basic picking pattern and chord changes-but there is another set of skills in the area of basic musicianship that usually get overlooked in favor of memorizing banjo sound effects like Foggy Mountain Breakdown.
Over the next few months, starting with the following workshop, I am going to present some of these basic skills starting with this workshop on understanding chord progressions. A lot of this material is covered in greater detail in by book The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo and the upcoming The How and the Tao of Folk Guitar, but there will be enough information presented here to get you started. Don't rush this stuff. Take the time to really get a feel for how chord progressions work (and as you will be reading a little further down it really is a matter of "feel") before you move on to the next workshop. This isn't a race- and besides, when you drive too fast you can't enjoy the scenery. You'll be speeding through the countryside telling your kids, "That red blur was a barn and the brown blur was a cow." Getting Started
I am going to assume that you can play some kind of basic picking pattern in 4/4 and 3/4 time. If not, you may want to check out the free basic frailing workshop available here at Funkyseagull.com or pick up one of our CD ROM workshops. We'll get into other time signatures like 6/8 down the road (God forbid we don't go into some Irish fiddle tunes) but for right now we're going to stick to playing in 4/4 and 3/4 time.
I know, right now some of you are thinking "time signatures?"
When I say that a song is in 4/4 time that four slash four or four over four is a time signature. Up to now we have just taken for granted that 4/4 means four beats to a measure and 3/4 time was three beats to a measure.
We'll go into this subject in more detail a couple of workshops down the road, or you can pick up some of the material we have available on CD ROM.
If you can play a bump dit-ty for 4/4 time and a bump ditty-ditty for 3/4 time you've got the picking hand down enough to start messing with this stuff.
At this point I should add that this stuff isn't frailing-specific. I just happen to really like frailing banjo. A boom-shuck and boom shuck-shuck on the guitar or some find of 4/4 and 3/4 finger picking patterns for bluegrass and other styles of banjo will work just fine. Music is music. A G note on the mandolin is the same as a G note on the banjo- they just sound a little different because the instruments have different voices Building Chord Progressions
I think the first step to really being able to use chord progressions is learning how they are built. If I just say, "In the key of C you usually can count on the song using the C, F and G chords" if doesn't give you the whole