The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo ebook edition by Patrick Costello For Tiny. Pick-Ware Publications PO Box 110 Crisfield, MD 21817 http://www.pick-ware.com © 2003 Joseph Patrick Costello III Contents Introduction Pinky Power The How of Old-Time Banjo Playing In D Getting Started Minor Scales Basic Frailing More Cool Stuff With Note Values Scales & Chords Your First Chord Other Picking Patterns Your First Song Reading Music The C Chord The Tao of old-time banjo The F Chord Going With The Flow Melody & Rhythm Playing well with others Putting It All Together Cool old dudes Taking A “Break” “I’ve always wanted Chord Forms to play the banjo!” Playing In 3/4 Time Plateaus & Ruts Drop Thumb Tying up the cat & Double Thumb Hidden Potential Bends & Vibrato The chicken dancers Chopping & Vamping Don’t quit your day job Other Rhythm Stage Fright & Volume Tricks Brain freeze Licks One of the old timers Harmonics Get lost Scales Getting The Feel Funkyseagull & Pik-Ware Catalog of The Music Playing Up The Neck Chord “Bouncing” Playing In The “Box” 2 Introduction “What have you got, kid?” The old man asked me around his cigar. “A banjo!” I replied. ”I know that you little dipstick.” He said rolling his eyes “You think somebody as old as I am hasn’t seen a banjo before? What have you got? Play something.” I thought about trying to say something to get out of this. As I stood there fidgeting the old man shook his head, picked up his guitar and started to walk away. Oh man, I thought to myself, I’m really blowing something here. It was an August day. The festival was being held on this big open field and the sun was just hammering down on us. I knew a total of three and a half songs. I didn’t want to make a fool out of myself but I also had the feeling that if I chickened out here I was going to miss out on something. I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath, moved my banjo strap a little bit on my shoulder and started to pound my way through a tune called “The White House Blues”. The old man cocked his head and nodded a little before he turned around. He stood there holding a beat up guitar while cigar smoke billowed around his head. He seemed to enjoy listening to me ruin a perfectly good song. He didn’t walk away and he didn’t tell me to stop so I ran through the tune again. I looked back up and saw that the old man had waved a couple of his buddies over. Old guys wearing kaki slacks that went up nearly to their armpits slinging battered guitars and mandolins gathered around me. “That almost sounds like White House Blues.” ”Can’t be. Ain’t no kid that young knows that song.” “It might be The White House Blues, but the kid is so scared that he’s playing it too fast.” Nobody said stop so I ran through it again. I was starting to calm down a bit. The old man with the guitar said something to one of the guys standing around me that I didn’t hear but his cronies all got a good chuckle out of it. Most of the time he just listened with his head sort of cocked off to one side while he smoked his cigar and tapped his foot. I finished another run through the song and stopped. The old guys gave a little cheer and a couple of them gave me a pat on the back saying, “not bad, kid!” The old man with the guitar just went on smoking for a moment. Then he began playing “The White House Blues”. A fiddle joined in. Then a mandolin and a few more guitars started weaving in and out of the melody. They ran through that song the way you would walk through your own living room. 3 In other words, they played it a heck of a lot better than I did. After playing the song a few times the old guy with the cigar nodded to his buddies and they all ended at the same time. The playing was great but that trick of everybody stopping at the same time just blew me away. He said, “First thing you’ve got to do is slow down. Then you want to work on that move into the F chord. You can try it like this.” He went on to show me a couple of tricks to smooth out the song while his gang looked on. One of the other guys showed me a lick and another had me play the song again while he thumped out the rhythm on his mandolin. “It’s the rhythm, kid,” he said “That’s got to stay the same no matter what happens.” Once they knew that I was getting what they were showing me they sort of backed off and the old guy with the cigar said, “Ok now, get lost. Go on and work on that. Don’t come back until you can do like we showed you.” And they all walked away leaving me standing in the hot August sun wondering what the heck had just happened. I did go home and practice what they shared with me and I kept coming back. Not just to that group of old men but anywhere I could run into somebody and pick up a tune, lick or idea. I am starting out with this story because it is really important that you understand right off the bat that you cannot become a banjo player from reading a book. I can share with you the basic techniques needed to start playing and I can show you some tricks that will make your playing more exciting but nothing is going to take the place of experience. I got started on the banjo when I was fifteen years old because my father bet me his banjo that I couldn’t teach myself how to play it. Today my father and I like to joke that while he might have lost the bet he came out a winner because the two of us have had some pretty amazing adventures over the years sharing our love of music with people around the world. As a kid in Philadelphia I found it hard to glean useful information about playing the banjo from books. There were one or two good titles but most of the things I know about the banjo today are either the result of thousands of hours of playing or were taught to me by other banjo players. Back then I used to talk quite a bit about how much easier it would be to learn the banjo if there was a book that just laid out how things worked. A book that said, “Ok now, go on and work on that. Don’t come back until you can do like we showed you.” An old banjo-picking friend always said that he was going to write that book. He would ramble on for hours about how he was going to write it all down but he never got around to picking up a pencil. When he passed away a few years ago I 4 figured that book was never going to be published because I sure wasn’t going to write it. Not too long ago a teacher friend of mine mentioned that he was starting an after school banjo program so I decided to put together a couple of pages covering tuning and basic old time banjo skills to get the kids started. It was never my intention to write a “banjo book” but when I got past sixty pages I realized that this was going to be a little bit more than a mimeographed handout. It was turning into something like the resource that we talked about all those years ago. Don’t go into this thinking that you can work your way through it in a weekend. It’s going to take a good deal of time and hard work just to get the basic frailing strum down smooth. It’s going to take you time to be able to change a few chords without screwing up. An old friend of mine used to tell his students that it takes about five hundred to a thousand hours of practice to become a half-decent banjo player. Whether those hours take months or years to complete depends on how hard you are willing to work. The good news is that if all you ever manage to learn is the basic strum and three chords you can play thousands, yes thousands, of songs. I don’t expect you to be familiar with all the songs in this book. When I was just starting on the banjo a big part of the fun was the fact that everything was brand new. In a lot of ways not having somebody around to tell me exactly how a song should be played gave me the freedom to come up with my own ideas. Most of these songs are very old but to a beginner they are brand spanking new. If you do get stuck on the melody line of a song I suggest that you do what I did and go exploring. Find an old guitar player in your town. Bug the local radio station to play some folk music.