Music Education

Learning Banjo - How to Play By Ear

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If you don't want to use the C at the fifth fret you can always jump all the way back up to your basic C chord. In the next example we are playing the whole chord as a hammer-on to make it interesting, and to give us a moment of breathing room to make that long run down the fretboard:

Next month we are going to dig a lot deeper into movable chord positions and start looking at finding scales on the fretboard.

One thing I would suggest when it comes to picking up new ideas for your backup playing is to listen to, and hang out with, as may guitar players as you can find. Guitar players as diverse as Riley Pluckett and Robert Johnson hade a lot of cool ideas that can be reshaped to fit into the frailing banjo framework. Listen to Jhonny Cash and Hank Williams. Lonnie Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt. Then listen to some mandolin players like Bill Monroe. Good backup is everywhere because it adds so much to the music without overwhelming anything.

And don't forget to sing. Banjo solos get boring.

Until then play and sing a whole bunch of songs. Don't play any faster than you can sing. Teach a kid to play the banjo- and never step in anything soft!

-Patrick 1/19/04