Music Education

Learning Banjo - How to Play By Ear

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In our last workshop we ended up playing a simple version of Boil Them cabbage Down in C and I asked you to mess around with the Nashville number system to figure out the chord progression in other keys.

For the key of C we had:

Boil Them cabbage Down in C:

And for the key of G (where the 1-4-5 chord progression would be G C D) we could get something like:

Boil Them cabbage Down in G:

As I said before, if all you ever learn you can go on to sing thousands of songs. But since we're here let's take a quick look at things we can do to "dress up" the tune.

Instead of figuring out the melody line note-by-note the easiest way to make your playing more interesting is to start messing around with the rhythm and the chord forms and picking up a few licks.

The easiest way to back up a tune is to frail a sort of alternating bass pattern by playing the fourth and third strings alternately as the "bump in the bump dit-ty strum.

For G you would get something like this: