| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
have a songbook there are a lot of places on the web to find folk song lyrics.
You also want to start listening to as much music as you can get your hands on. Web radio is a great free resource with sites like www.hober.com and Sugar In The Gourd providing you with a ton of great music.
When you listen, don't listen to the notes. Listen to the rhythm (it'll help you get ready for the next workshop) and most of all listen for the chord changes.
I'm not kidding. If you pay attention you'll be able to hear where the song changes chords. If you get bold and adventurous start strumming along with the music and see if you can work out the chord progression on your own.
Until next time, have fun.
And never step in anything soft. Part Two: Interesting Backup
By now you know how to figure out a basic chord progression in a major key. Hopefully you have spent a little bit of time just singing and playing a simple rhythm on your banjo in the past few weeks because now we're going to expand on that basic rhythm and start building up our hands and our ears by learning to play some interesting backup.
Playing backup "stuff" is one of those topics that seems to be overlooked by a lot of old time banjo players and it's kind of a shame because its not only an almost essential skill to have if you want to jam and interact with other musicians, it also is a great way to get used to the structure of songs.
The trend today is to learn individual tunes and just have everybody bang out the melody and that's kind of a limiting way to jam.
Good backup gives you time to pick up the melody and it also gives you some pretty cool results when you are playing and singing.
It also has a neat way to expanding your repertoire without trying to remember a whole lot of individual notes. If you can play even the simplest backup technique and sing people will think you are the greatest thing since frozen orange juice because our ears have a weird way of "completing" what we hear. While you might just hear yourself singing along with a bum dit-ty strum people will think you are doing sixteen different things at once.
Is it traditional?
It is, but a lot of players (usually tab monkeys) will tell you otherwise.
Banjo players have been playing and singing for a long time. Some really amazing players like Buell kazee (http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=Dyingsoldier) did some really neat stuff working with ideas that at least followed the same lines as what's presented here.