Learning Banjo

Hi folks,

I understand that you subscribed for guitar posts, and I have failed to publish a wrap-up post for the guitar build. I want to record some (simple!) demos and take some nice photos to put in that post, and I’ve ordered a nice guitar stand to hang the guitar¹ on. It’s going to take a little longer to get that sorted —² so I have decided to update you on something a little different: some insights from this year’s banjo learning endeavor!

Kinds of banjo

I initially intended to get into banjo to connect more with Irish traditional music, and because I felt that it could potentially teach me skills I could then apply to guitar playing.

I received my banjo as a Christmas gift, and on Christmas day one of the first things I learned about the banjo was that I should’ve been more specific. Banjos come in 2 main flavors and a sub-flavor.

Tenor banjos are used in Irish traditional music. I hear you wondering why an Irish folk music tradition uses an instrument refined in America based on a folk instrument carried to the new world by enslaved people from Africa. That’s a whole thing, I don’t honestly know the full answer, so I’ll leave you to research (or I’ll come back to it later). In the mean time, I’ll point out that the "" is a thing. These are tuned in 5ths, like a mandolin or a violin.

What I got was a 5 string banjo. This is the instrument associated with American bluegrass, Appalachian folk music, old-style, clawhammer, and more recently, melodic style. It’s the one Earl Scruggs, Béla Fleck, Abigail Washburn, Roscoe Holcomb, and Steve Martin play.

No problem, I thought, surely some Irish traditional musicians play the 5 string. And it’s true, Luke Kelly played the 5 string banjo. However, he played a variant, designed by Pete Seeger, that takes the 5 string banjo and just adds three additional frets - not at the high end of the fretboard like a 24 fret vs a 22 fret guitar, but at the low end, so the open G tuning would go down to open E given the same string tension. The high string is in line with the 8th fret, instead of the 5th. Great for singing - I have a bass range voice, and I’ve found it’s very difficult for me to hit the notes required in G (the banjo’s most natural key). So Luke Kelly music doesn’t work with this banjo.

The first big difference between a 5 string banjo (aside from the playing styles) is that the strings are not ordered in ascending pitch order - first there’s a high G, then down to a low D, then the G an octave below the first G, B, and D. It works out to an open G major.

Techniques

I thought initially that because I’ve been playing guitar for 20 years, I should have a leg up with the banjo. After all, when I was a teen and a music student I used to pick up various instruments and be able to play through a simple song within an hour of noodling and figuring things out. Not so with the banjo. Strumming chords is possible, but it’s not really taking advantage of the instrument. Instead, there are a couple of more specific techniques.

Up-plucking is a technique used in old-style banjo where you pluck a string, then strum, then hit the high G with your thumb in a 1/4 - 1/8 1/8 pattern. It’s one of the “this is what a banjo should sound like” sounds. That with a couple of major chords and you can play songs like Camptown Races and Amazing Grace. The idea is that with that first quarter note you hit a melody, and you build up the muscle memory of the pattern so you can do it quickly enough that you focus on the pattern. One representative player is Roscoe Holcomb.

Clawhammer is similar, but you hit the first string with your nail of your index finger. It’s also played on different instruments - often fretless, open back 5 string banjos with a scoop in the fretboard for the player to pluck further up the strings for a more mellow sound. Players include Rhiannon Giddens and Abigail Washburn.

In contrast to the mellow sound of clawhammer, there’s bluegrass style, or “Scruggs style”, named after Earl Scruggs. It’s a three finger plucking style that uses hard picks and picking patterns called rolls to really get up to high speeds. This style includes a lot of the wider known banjo songs like Duelling Banjos. Here’s a link for some Earl Scruggs.

The last “main” style (though there are lots of other styles and sub-styles) is called “melodic”. This incorporates so much - classical music (inviting the comparison to the harpsichord when playing Bach or Paganini), jazz, and pop. The idea is that you play melodies across strings. It seems to me to require a level of fluency with the fretboard that I haven’t got on guitar after 20 years. Béla Fleck is probably the canonical melodic player. He’s known for his collabration with the Jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea.

My learning

My first port of call for learning banjo was YouTube. There are several channels I watched videos from, but Jim Pankey was who I first focused on.

I was totally shocked how different it was to guitar. I learned Cripple Creek in the bluegrass style initially, and then spent 6 months getting it closer to speed (though I’m still nowhere near the bluegrass recordings).

I stagnated there for longer than I hoped - I sort of fell off banjo, but I occasionally would pick up the banjo and play that one song. I found the rolls tricky, and the banjo was loud.

Incidentally, I removed the back from the banjo. I’m not sure if that’s sacreligious or what - but it’s a resonator, and it made the banjo sound less bright and loud, which was fine for what I was going for. I also stuck a towel in between the drum head and the rod that keeps the neck on straight to further dull the sound. It works well for me.

I got decision paralysis - I could’ve focused hard on learning the bluegrass technique, mastering the fretboard, learning scales, learning chords. I knew I wanted to get to a stage where I could noodle around and improvise playing my own things, or playing along to songs I already knew, but I didn’t have a particular path in mind. I was struggling with bluegrass style, but I felt that I had started that style, and I shouldn’t switch to something else before I had made some progress with it.

I ended up buying two books:

• How to Play Banjo - Tim Jumper

A beginner book. I thought it would be too basic coming from guitar, but not at all. It takes you through a couple of styles, from up-picking to clawhammer and then bluegrass. It introduces concepts one by one and gives you songs to practice. It’s great. A real breakthrough for me. Broke me out of thinking “I must specifically and only learn bluegrass” to “I’m a beginner, I can try out multiple things and see what speaks to me, and in the mean time build up skills one by one that will apply to everything and help me build fluency with this completely different note layout”

• The Contemporary Banjo Player - John Dowling

Also ok for beginners, but focused on bluegrass and goes way farther. I haven’t started with this book yet, but it gets into some really quite advanced techniques towards the end. Whereas “How to Play Banjo” will get you going and give you some direction for your next round of study, “The Contemporary Banjo Player” is more comprehensive. I look forward to getting around to it soon.

Things I can’t just not mention but don’t really know how to bring up

The history of the banjo (as with all modern popular music) is inherently linked to the transatlantic slave trade. Worse still, banjos were at one point primarily known for their use in minstrel shows - where white performers would use blackface and mock Black people. It was gross. I don’t really know what more to say about that, but I feel like it would’ve been wrong to not acknowledge that ugly history.

Also there’s a song called Cripple Creek that I learned by melody, and upon hearing the lyrics they seem very dodgy.

The end

That’s what I learned about banjo so far. I’m going to keep working through the book. The moral of the story is that while picking one thing and focusing on it can be a good way to learn, there’s also some value in trying something else when you get stuck. It’s also inspired me to try things out on guitar - I guess there’s a whole genre of bluegrass guitar techniques, maybe including things like rolls, alternate picking, and open tunings for me to try out.

I have also been watching a lot of “build a simple banjo” videos on YouTube, and I just removed a load of mahogany skirting boards I’m not using, so we’ll see if that comes to anything.

Thanks for reading! The purpose of this blog is for me to post about things I make - not just musical instruments - and one of the things I make is music. Long ago, it was music for other people, but these days it’s mainly music just for my own enjoyment. In the future I’ll likely write about (hopefully) new instruments I make, maybe some music I make, and definitely things like electronics, 3d prints, machines and tools, wooden things, baskets (I got into basketry once and fell off due to difficulty sourcing materials), games, and maybe even software. Just a heads up so that you know what to expect!

Best of luck to ye out there in the grimdark future.

• Nermut

Footnotes

1. I can’t use the ones I already have because it’s an offset, so it only goes in my rack and not on my stands that are designed for symmetrical guitars. ↩

2. I will never publish AI generated text without labelling it as such. I wrote that m-dash with my own gosh darn human fingers! ↩