Good Songwriters Listen Carefully
Certain songwriters take months to write and rewrite the lyrics for an album’s worth of songs. They serve as their own scrupulous editors and critics, and the bar is set very high. Others operate in an entirely different way, improvising their lyrics and even some of the music right on the spot when they get to the recording studio. As a beginner, you should focus on the rehearsed style of writing.
Listen to a few of your favorite pop songs over and over, dissecting the parts that make them tuneful. Are there multiple-part harmonies, guitar solos or obscure instrumentation? Does the song sound “produced” or sonically sparse? These are the questioned that should be asked by a beginner songwriting for the first time—whether you’re preparing music for an orchestra or the 6 string banjo. Don’t be afraid to use music production software, but don’t rely on a computer to come up with the ideas for you.
Banjos have a long history dating back to ancient Egypt, and they’ve evolved today into four basic genres. Folk or Traditional music features a clawhammer (also called a frailing) open-back five-string banjo. It’s usually played with the index finger and the thumb, and produces a melodious sound. It grew in popularity during the American Civil War as soldiers strummed and plucked it around the evening campfires. The standard strings of the day were made from purified cattle entrails, and the banjo head was made from calfskin, giving the instrument a mellow and relaxing tone. Though most clawhammer banjos use steel strings today, many nostalgic players prefer a modern synthetic string set that emulates the old sound. Notable clawhammer banjo artists include Grandpa Jones and Pete Seeger, and Dave Guard (The Kingston Trio).
Dixieland Jazz music came of age in southern Louisiana in the early 1900s and found its home in New Orleans. Four-string banjos became prominent in Dixieland bands due to their volume and percussive rhythm sound. They were strummed with a single flat-pick, and accomplished players such as Eddie Peabody and Perry Bechtel would also pick out the melody notes. The two standard four-string Dixieland banjos are the 19-fret tenor model and the 22-fret plectrum model. Their popularity exploded during the early jazz age; some call it the electric guitar of its day. By the late 1920s, Gibson, Vega and other instrument makers had added a resonator on the back that projected the banjo sound toward the audience, and a bell-bronze tone ring that gave the banjo more depth and clarity of sound.
Irish Folk music has been around for centuries; today the 4-string, 17-fret banjo is the standard for the genre. It’s tuned the same as a fiddle and mandolin, making it easier for musicians to play multiple instruments. Artists who helped popularize Irish Folk music include Gerry O’Connor and Seamus Egan. Listen closely to the style of music, and you’ll discover where bluegrass music got its roots.
The most popular banjo music today is bluegrass, which got its name from Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. Monroe hailed from the bluegrass state of Kentucky. Though he was billed as a country artist during most of his career, his unique style of music developed into a category all its own. Banjo legend Earl Scruggs joined Monroe’s band in 1945 and appeared on the Grand Ole Opry stage for the first time. His unique style of picking electrified audiences. He played a five-string resonator banjo with a thumbpick and two fingerpicks, often at breakneck speed, with a clarity and precision that constituted an entirely new and exciting sound. By 1948 Scruggs left Monroe to form his own band with singer Lester Flatt. Foggy Mountain Breakdown and The Ballad of Jed Clampett became two of their most popular songs. Scruggs, who turned 86 in January 2010, is still touring with his banjo.
When people make resolutions or set goals for themselves, a common thread is that they would like to learn how to play a musical instrument. And for many people, there is a strong desire to learn how to play the guitar. Guitar is a great starter instrument because once you learn some of the basics, you can already sound halfway decent. Of course, learning the finer points and the complicated picking patterns can take you years to master, but it really only takes a few weeks to master some of those basic chords.
This is why so many people opt for acoustic guitars. If you want to learn how to play this instrument, just pick yourself up a guitar, a tuner, and a few how-to beginner books. These will offer the basics of reading music along with a chord list. Once you feel you have a handle on these very basic elements, hop onto YouTube for step-by-step tutorials on how to play all your favorite songs.
When my youngest son endeavored to learn the banjo last year, I honestly knew nothing about the instrument. After going to a local music shop, I decided that purchasing the various components individually would be much too costly and time consuming. After doing some research online, I found a site that carried comprehensive banjo starter packs.
Not only did they come with a quality banjo, but the packs also included a case, strap, beginner’s books and picks. When my son got the package, he was overwhelmed and quickly began learning the instrument.. Although the music was atrocious at first, he rapidly developed his skill and can now play several classic tunes.
The term fiddle is used to describe a wide range of bowed instruments. While the definition of fiddles is somewhat ambiguous, it now usually refers to a violin-type instrument. The earliest versions of the fiddle (bowed instruments) appeared in Asia in roughly 3000 BC.
Today the fiddle is a staple in bluegrass music. Although it closely resembles the violin, the two have a vastly different price range. Typically, the fiddle produces a more twangy and rustic sound than the classical violin.
I remember going to Dairy Queen when I was only five or six years old and getting a cheap harmonica as the prize in my kid’s meal. While harmonicas are often given out as prizes and considered a basic instrument, refining the art takes a great deal of skill. As anyone who has ever tried one can attest, it may be simple to make noise, but making it sound good is another story.
The harmonica is a staple in blues and folk music and features a distinct sound. As a reed instrument, the sound from a harmonica is created by the reeds vibrating when you blow. With one little instrument, you can play a vast range of notes without painstaking tuning.
Few people have left as indelible of a mark on their craft as Earl Scruggs. The three-finger playing style was in use before Scruggs, but he is the one who perfected the art and made it the predominant style in bluegrass music. Today the style is referred to as “Scruggs style,” as homage to its originator.
Although many people are unfamiliar with Scruggs’ music, his influence is widespread. Over the course of his career, Scruggs has earned to Grammy Awards, most recently in 2002. He also earned the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2008 Grammy ceremonies.
No brand name looms larger in the bluegrass banjo world than Gibson. The company’s story goes back to the late 1800s when a young man named Orville Gibson, son of an English immigrant, moved from his native New York to the rapidly-growing industrial town of Kalamazoo, Michigan (“Yes”, said the Kalamazoo Chamber of Commerce in a 1980s publicity campaign, “There Really Is a Kalamazoo”). Although Orville worked a variety of odd jobs to support himself, he was a musician and luthier with radical ideas about instrument construction. The mandolin was the most popular fretted instrument of the day, and Orville’s vision was to apply the same principles of carving and top graduation to the mandolin that Stradivarius and his contemporaries had employed in building their legendary violins.
Orville’s creations were a dramatic departure from the round-back “tater bug” mandolin, with its flat top and its back formed out of narrow strips of bent wood. A group of Kalamazoo investors saw money to be made in marketing Orville’s designs to the mandolin-buying public and the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company was formed in 1902. Always an enigmatic figure, Orville appears to have had limited involvement with the Gibson company after its first few years. The Gibson company refined and built on Orville’s ideas and responded to the increasing popularity of the tenor banjo by producing its first banjo in 1918—the same year that Orville died back home in New York.
After some initial stumbling in search of the right design, by the late 1920s Gibson was a dominant force in the 4-string tenor banjo market. The company also made a precious few “old-timey” 5-string banjos, primarily for the rural Southern market; it was one of these banjos that Earl Scruggs would use in the years immediately following World War II to develop a new style of picking for bluegrass music. Despite changes in ownership and a relocation from Kalamazoo to Nashville, Tennessee, Gibson banjo production has continued to the current day. Since the late 1980s, the company’s banjo output has consisted largely of reissues of its classic models of the 1920s and 1930s.
Many people—myself included—think of the banjo as being a traditional instrument that has seen little modification over the years. Just as with guitars, there are several different options for the number of strings that are on your instrument, but this is usually where the deviation in banjo designs ceases. While it is true that the basic design has changed little in recent decades, there have been significant advances in banjo technology.
One of the most revolutionary renovations has been the advent of the electric banjo. These models may feature a slightly more modern design, but, obviously, the main development is the addition of electricity to amplify the sound. This allows you to get the power of an electric guitar while preserving the distinct banjo sound.
There are lots of banjo-player jokes. One goes “You can drop a shoe on the banjo and make music,” due to the “open G” tuning that is standard among bluegrass banjoists. Unlike a guitar or mandolin, which must be fretted to make a proper chord, merely strumming the open strings of a banjo (or dropping a shoe on it) will produce a G major chord. This tuning of D-B-G-D-g (from first to fifth string) provides two G notes an octave apart, two D notes an octave apart, and one B note, thus filling in the three notes of a G major triad. While the vast majority of bluegrass banjo work is performed with this tuning, alternate tunings are sometimes employed. The “drop C” tuning of D-B-G-C-g was considered the standard tuning in the classical banjo era around 1900 and is sometimes used by bluegrass players to provide a low root note when playing in the C position. Bluegrass banjo standards traditionally performed in C tuning include Home Sweet Home and Farewell Blues as recorded by Earl Scruggs.
The next most-common tuning for bluegrass banjo is open D, either D-A-F#-D-F# or D-A-F#-D-a (the fifth string can either be tuned down one fret from G to provide the third note of the D major triad, or tuned up two frets to provide the fifth note). Reuben and John Henry are traditionally played in this tuning, and Ron Block has used it to great advantage in his work with Alison Krauss and Union Station. Rare alternate tunings include G minor (D-Bb-G-D-g) as used by Ben Eldridge in his original instrumental Appalachian Rain recorded with The Seldom Scene, and D minor (aDFAD) as featured by Earl Scruggs in Nashville Blues.
The world of old-time clawhammer banjo makes use of a much greater variety of tunings including “double C” (D-C-D-Cg) and open C (E-C-D-C-g), to name just two. . . but that’s a subject for another post!