Comment by Jody Stecher on May 8, 2016 at 15:11

Eric, I have four comments. 

1) what you are looking for can be found in the Second Banjo parts of the printed classic repertoire. Not everything in the library has second parts but there enough of them to give you an idea of what to do. Second Part is the accompaniment.  You can also find accompaniment scores for songs (the  stuff with words that singers do) in the earlier tutor books and these can sometimes be found in stroke style tutors as well. 

2) you don't need much technique to play the music you want to play. Just learn the principal chords in the keys that your church singers tend to sing in. You can use clawhammer or stroke technique for the right hand or "classic" right hand technique or mix them or use a pick or play it like a uke or make up your own right hand stuff.

3) In regard to  your penultimate sentence: the playing style of classic banjo does not exist in the abstract. Its techniques are one with the repertoire. They developed for the purpose of playing particular sorts of music. The technique is preserved by means of the repertoire.  If you want a banjo sound in your church band why not get a banjo uke and use that? you already know how to play uke.  

4) if classic banjo music is not what you want to play don't play it. No one is forcing you.  This is difficult music to play. More videos and tabs will not change that.  Only the individual player can decide if the effort is worth it.  Putting in the effort will not make you a better song accompanist and it won't make you better at staying aligned with the pianist. 

Comment by Jody Stecher on May 8, 2016 at 18:40

Eric, 

expanding on my second comment, in gCGBD tuning there are a few chords that use open strings. Most of the chords are in closed positions and are on three or four strings. If you learn all possible closed chords in C major you have learned all possible chords in 12 other keys. Just move them up and down the fingerboard. A weakness of classic banjo teaching method is to label these chord positions according to the fingers and strings used. So we immediately know how to play a 312 chord or a 124 chord but this tells us nothing whatever about the musical meaning of these chords. My advice to you is to look at a collection of plectrum banjo chords. The tuning is just like the basic tuning of classic banjo except without the short g string.  These chords will be labeled as Eflat7  and C minor and A flat augmented  etc. You will quickly see that, for instance, that all possible *closed string* formations for a C major chord  are exactly the same as the formations for D flat major chord, except that the C chords are one fret lower than the D flat chords. 

re your technique not being good enough to transfer across genres:  for song accompaniment you need to use your thumb on the two lowest strings, mostly the the low fourth string and the thumb, index and for the chords between the downbeat bass strokes you need to use the middle all together on either strings 3,2 and 1 or 5, 2 and 1.  sometimes you can do a "rasp" or a brush stoke with one finger or the fingernails of all fingers in succession. This is very basic stuff.  you can also play ascending or descending arpeggios, using the thumb and fingers in succession. Just do it as you please.

expanding on the last sentence in my fourth comment: the skills you say you want to learn and the purpose to which you wish to apply them…. are not taught or learned via tab or videos. They are learned through experience.  Experience takes place over time. If you want to be a good accompanist you have to develop your ear so that you phrase in time with each singer. If you want your accompaniment to primarily be an adjunct to the piano (it's a worthy goal) you need to learn to hear and understand what the pianist is doing. This skill cannot be taught via tablature. It is almost like a social skill or an athletic skill. It's all about listening well. How can more videos about right hand technique help with that?   

Learning how to play banjo solos like Sunflower Dance is not going to help you with song accompaniment  any more than learning Sunflower Dance is going to help you with plumbing, surgery, rocket science, or sweeping a floor.   

Comment by Jody Stecher on May 9, 2016 at 14:07

 I did not say videos can't help with difficult music. I said that videos will not make difficult music into something not difficult. The student has to learn certain things, including patience. Why is having 100 videos that say this over and over  better than 3 videos that say it once?  Do you mean you want there to be a video for every piece of repertoire? showing how to move the hands measure by measure?  

 I also said that videos that guide the student to play solo banjo music will not help the student be an accompanist. That is a different skill set.

 As for tab, to suggest that it is "better" than  is to ignore the overwhelming evidence that it isn't. The evidence is the ever-growing number of banjo hopeful students who have become musically crippled by using tab too early in their learning process.

Comment by Andy Chase on May 10, 2016 at 14:21

I think classic banjo has a tough time because of the inherent difficulty of the style and the modern lack of context for the repertoire.

When talking about the banjo with non-banjo enthusiasts, I am continually reminded that most people, even fellow musicians who are quite accomplished on other instruments, don't really know anything about them; you're doing well if you find somebody who knows the difference between a five string and a tenor, or which one is typically used in which styles of playing. When I tell people that I play much older/different styles than what people associate with banjo nowadays, they say "Oh, you mean like bluegrass?"

Among five string players the breakdown is basically bluegrass vs. oldtime, although there seems to be a bit more awareness of minstrel-era banjo these days (in the U.S. the recent sesquicentennial of the civil war probably has something to do with that; many people find their way to stroke style via living history, because they want to play authentic music at reenactments.)

But classic style seems to fall between the cracks, maybe because it lacks the romantic historical context of the civil war, and doesn't have the "old timey" caché of early country stuff.  Although there are recordings of the greats, modern banjo enthusiasts don't know what to make of them; I forget what banjo forum I was on where somebody posted a link to a Van Eps recording, asking about the style, and they were flatly told by an "expert" that there was no way it was five string banjo, had to be some kind of fancy four string picking.  I myself remember coming across some Ossman and Van Eps recordings when I was first looking into learning banjo and having no idea what I was listening to; this was in the early 2000s when there was a lot less information floating around online, so they were just audio clips without any context or history.

And it is a difficult style requiring discipline and practice - for me, anyway.  It takes me much longer to get even the most basic classic style piece under my fingers than the clawhammer tunes I used to learn, or most stroke style tunes, and because I do this in my spare time there are times where the effort/fun balance teeters, and I slip back to playing stroke style because I can work up a tune in just a day or two.

I do think that reading notation helps me learn and mentally deconstruct classic style compositions in a different and more effective way than tablature... but that's another skill that I'm still developing, so it's sometimes slow going all around.

What we need is a hit movie and soundtrack that does for classic banjo what "O Brother Where Art Thou" did for old-timey music.

Comment by Jody Stecher on May 10, 2016 at 15:59

A.N. Chase: all true, and well said.

Comment by Andy Chase on May 10, 2016 at 17:00

I also should have said up front with regards to the original video - a nice performance and neat to see the classic style in Japan!

And on re-reading Eric's comment this jumped out at me:

The feeling I get from this site is that it is more about preserving the repertoire than teaching the playing style!

I would say that the repertoire and playing style are somewhat inseparable, and that for many classic banjo enthusiasts the appeal <em>is</em> the repertoire as much as the style... and because so many of the old tutors are still perfectly viable and freely available, people who find their way to this music haven't felt the need to modernize anything.  It's true that lacking some kind of popular revival, classic banjo is perhaps a little bit self-selecting to autodidacts who actively like the repertoire, and have the patience to either learn to read notation or tab things out for themselves.

Comment by carrie horgan on May 10, 2016 at 20:34

Hmm, it's more that other genres have their own traditions - for example, celtic music is more associated with the tenor banjo.  However, there is no reason why classic banjo cannot be used to accompany most songs as it is a chordal-based way of playing.  I don't think classic-style lends itself easily to fiddle tunes though (I'm ready to be shot down in flames).  In fact, the reason why I think classic-banjo struggles to gain popularity is that the banjo is strongly associated with American folk music and, if you listen to what is called 'oldtime' music, fiddle tunes predominate.

I guess most people take up an instrument so they can play with other people and so my personal mission is to infiltrate my local bluegrass jam and sneak in a few classic-banjo tunes!  I think when people hear classic banjo they like it - they just don't hear it enough, as it's not really part of the traditional repertoire.  I personally really love the ragtime-side of classic banjo but that leads on into the world of early jazz - Fred Van Eps has more in common with the virtuoso playing of Harry Reser than any old-time banjo player - unfortunately, the 5string banjo fizzled out when jazz came along.  It's like the 5-string banjo died out for a couple of decades and re-emerged in a different genre. 

Well, I think we just need to spread the word - this site is a wonderful resource and has really helped me on my journey.  Let's keep making videos and will some of you ace players please get going and make some albums.  Thank you.  

Comment by carrie horgan on May 10, 2016 at 21:31

Me again.  As soon as I wrote that, I thought 'wrong!'  Here is Clarke Buehling doing banjo accompaniment to a fiddle tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AkBNfpZ-Wg

Comment by Steve Harrison on May 10, 2016 at 22:17

Hi Carrie, have a listen to 'I know who holds tomorrow' that I posted some time back (it's in the library) following a request by Eric. It's a simple song accompaniment in the classic style. I wrote it in the key of A as that was the key in which it was performed and without the use of the fifth string. This shows that it is possible to do with a little thought....Steve. 

Comment by Jody Stecher on May 10, 2016 at 23:24

Hi Carrie.

The classic banjo right hand techniques are well suited for playing fiddle tune melodies as well as playing accompaniment. Vess Ossman recorded several medleys of these. And some of Joe Morley's compositions have passages that are notated using  "melodic" technique (done years before Bill Keith, or Bobby Thompson, or Caroll Best), which is considered in bluegrass circles to be appropriate for fiddle tunes.  American traditional old-time music  is approximately 35% instrumental music, the rest is vocal music.  Some of the songs can be well accompanied, others are more effective as pure vocal music.  Of that instrumental  35%, only a portion is fiddle tunes. There is also pure non-fiddle-istic banjo music for instance. And banjo use historically has been more frequent as song accompaniment than as fiddle accompaniment, or solo instrumental music.  I know very well that the perception is different, especially in the UK. Another misperception is that clawhammer was the de facto technique in Appalachia and beyond for accompanying fiddle tunes or playing solo music. Not so. There were, and still are a number of 2 and 3 finger up-picking techniques as well. Some regional and personal repertoires were more compatible with these ways of playing banjo than with down picking. 

 Of the  repertoire of fiddle tunes (on both sides of the Atlantic for that matter) a  large portion is not-chord based. It is modal music for which all chord choices sound more wrong or less wrong but never ideal.  In the last 30 years or so many of these old modal non-harmonic tunes have gotten dumbed-down and distorted to make them fit chord patterns but they were once not that way and they employed some pitches that are between the frets, exactly in the same way that the traditional  vocal music did.  

But you are very right that classic banjo music is chord based. And this brings us back to the question of whether the classic technique(s) can be suitable for other music. Yes, the right  hand technique can work for any music. Classic banjo repertoire  is so very chord based that a very large percentage of any given Banjo Solo can be played with the left hand stationery, moving only from one chord position to another. But many of these chord positions make sounds that are not compatible with the melodies of traditional fiddle tunes. The juxtaposition of these melodies with the chords that perfectly suit another kind of music is jarring.  I have actually tasted garlic ice cream. It was an unfortunate pairing. 

Talking about "Celtic" music is a potential quagmire. I'll stick to Ireland in this post.  The first banjos in Ireland were of several types. One of these was five-string banjo. In the early 1960s more people probably heard Margaret Barry playing her Windsor 5 string zither-banjo than heard tenor or plectrum banjos. She accompanied her own singing and also the fiddle tunes of Michael Gorman.  *Her* repertoire was definitely chord based. His was not. She made it work. Sort of.  But she did not use the chord formations of classic banjo. Hers were simple major and minor triads and a few dominant 7th chords. This suited the music better than classic banjo's "uptown" chords would.

One more point. I am not at all sure that most people take up an instrument to be able play with others. Many do of course. Historically so many American old-time five string banjo players played solo. It may never be proven but the informal evidence is that at least as many of these solo players were women as were men. I think there were more women actually. They were players, some were singers as well, but they were not performers. That happened later (Cousin Emmy, Lilly May Ledford, Samantha Bumgarner et al). 

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