Music Education

Learning Banjo - How to Play By Ear

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picture. As soon as you play a song like Freight Train in C and run into the E chord you'll be thinking, "where the hell did that come from?"

So what "makes" a chord progression?

It's built on scales.

Now, don't freak out and run away here. I know that some goomer at a bluegrass festival might have convinced you that music theory is either hard or not applicable to the banjo but neither of those old wives tales is true.

Oh yeah, if you bring up that, "there aint no notes on a banjo," quote I'll spank you like a circus monkey.

Where were we? That's right, scales.

A scale is just a sequence of notes. The formal term is something more along the lines of "the key of E is a major mode with a root of E," but we won't be getting into modes for a while so thinking of it as a sequence of notes makes things easier for now.

In Western music we are only working with twelve notes. The twelve notes are named after the letters A through G with a note or half-step between each pair of letters except between B and C and E and F:

Your half step is either a sharp (#) or a flat (b.)

The half step between A and B can be called either A# or Bb.

A# means that the A note is raised one half step higher. Bb is the B note lowered one half step. A# and Bb are the same note and the other half steps follow the same pattern.

So with all twelve notes laid out you have the chromatic scale:

Once you understand the idea of half steps you can just write out your chromatic scale like this to save space and make it a tad clearer. The " | " symbol will be used to represent a half step.

To hear this on your banjo play the third string at the second fret (an A note) and play that string on each fret all the way through twelve frets for each note of the chromatic scale.

To figure out the notes of the C scale we need to lay out the string of notes starting with our root note. In this case the root note is C so we start with the C note. Because we are only working with the letters A through G the notes after the G note is going to be A. It might help to think of the notes as being laid out in a loop or circle.