I’ve recently realized that I’ve just completed five consecutive years of writing at least one banjo tab per week. I’ve published 200 of them in four books and am about to put out Book #5. It prompted me to wonder just why I was doing it and am seemingly unable to stop. There are just so many great tunes… At first they were tunes I knew from having learned them at festivals, jams, camps and so on. For a while i was really listening to recordings of banjo players -both commercial recordings and my own hand-held collections. Somewhere along the line I started only listening to fiddlers. I realized that was because it seemed to be the purest form of the melody. Mostly I’ve been listening to source recordings because for this giant repertoire of tunes the older recordings somehow revealed the real idiosyncrasies of what makes each tune or rendition unique. For a brief period I was writing tabs that had almost every note that the fiddle was playing. Big mistake- fun but big mistake. One long time student threatened to quit because the tabs were too difficult to play and even if you learned them they just had no groove. I’ve since shifted my approach to that of trying to imagine what I would play if I could climb into Mr. Peabody’s Time Machine and sit down with Ed Haley, John Salyer, Emmett Lundy, Luther Strong, Edden Hammons and on and on. So I’m now trying still to understand these tunes better (a process which I’m sure is unending). I’ve found a relational database that I can put on my phone that can aggregate some of the info that swirls around the creation and promulgation of these wonderful melodies. I’ve found that so many tunes are icebergs of information- just the tip peeks out of the water with the name of the tune. Below the waterline lurks a mountain of information consisting of facts, rumors, tall tales, historical references, alternate titles, family history, urban legends, travelogues and the like. The next thing I’m looking at is how the mountain geography and the direction of the rivers help determine how a tune (or parts of a tune) travels.
Category: Learning
How I Learn a New Tune
Melody is king. If there’s a tune I want to learn on the banjo, I start by listening to multiple recordings of fiddlers. I find at least ten recordings and listen to a couple of minutes worth of each- almost like scanning an article. This takes about half an hour. At the end of this time I hope to have a good idea of the shape of the tune, the key and the chord structure. I then take out my banjo and try to play along with my favorite recordings. After woodshedding for a while, I then try to write tablature of the tune.
Finding Recordings
There are tons of great online resources. I usually start with Larry Warren’s excellent site Slippery Hill. Within that site I start with the equally awesome collection assembled by Walt Koken and Claire Milliner. Use the Find feature of your browser and search a word in the title of the tune. Another great source is the Digital Library of Appalachia. Here’s an exhaustive page of links from David Lynch’s site Old-Time Music.
Shape of the Tune
I then load the tune into Capo, a program that slows the tune down without changing the pitch and let’s you set multiple loop points for listening to specific phrases. Other good programs are The Amazing Slow Downer and Song Surgeon. Choose a phrase. I think phrases seem to predominantly fall into four beat segments. Four quarter-note taps of your foot will generally give you a good starting point. Try to sing this phrase to yourself and notice the starting note and the ending note. Once you’ve sung the starting note, what happens at the next pitch? Does it rise in pitch? Does it fall? Does it stay the same? Is it a hill that climbs upward? What does it turn to head back downhill? This process takes repetition and lots of practice. Like anything, the more you do it the easier it gets.
What Key Is It?
Old-time music recordings are often in one of four keys. A major, G major, D major and C major. There’s also a fairly common modal key that sounds like A major but is somehow darker. Try to find and sing the note at the beginning or at the end of a tune. Once you’ve sung this note, does the music feel “at rest”? Do you feel that it could be the final note and that your ear is satisfied? Musical phrases are often defined by tension and resolution. The note that feels the most resolved is generally the same as the name of the key. Once identified and I can sing this note, I then try to find it on my banjo. Another good way is to sing into your chromatic tuner if it has a built in microphone and see the name of the note you’re singing.
Chords, Chords, Chords
In general when two notes happen in succession it is considered melody. When two notes happen at the same time it is considered harmony. When three notes happen at the same time it is often called a chord or a triad. Each key has a handful of chords associated with it and these three-note chords are assembled from notes from the seven-note scale of the key. In the key of G major I look for the chords G, C and D. In the key of A major common chords are A, D and E. In the key of D major the chords are D, G and A. In C major the chords are C, F and G. Other chords occasionally make appearances but the above chord sets are a good starting place when trying to understand how a tune works. When listening to a repeating loop of a section of the tune I try chords from the key until they sound right.
Sing the Phrases
In many fiddle tunes the melodic ideas are organized into four-beat phrases that I like to think of as questions and answers. These ideas or phrases show up multiple times in the tune. I start by trying to sing one phrase. Once I can sing it then I try to find those same notes on the banjo. I look for two groups of eight or so notes that make up a single phrase. At this point I also start to write tablature of the tune. This helps me to understand the tune. Phrase by phrase I follow this process and then play the notes on the banjo while listening to the looped phrase from the fiddle recording. When finished I play the tune against several different recordings and make adjustments as needed.
Make the Tune Your Own
At the end of this several hour-long (sometimes days-long) process I hope to have a personalized, customized arrangement somehow rooted in the performance of several fiddlers that have come from earlier times. A friend of mine the excellent fiddler Andy Reiner wisely said something to the effect that a piece of sheet music (or single arrangement) is not something to be held frozen in time as if behind a piece of glass in a museum. Tunes are living entities that grow and change with time.
The process of listening to a series of source-recordings and then developing an understanding of the melody that you can then share with others I think is a time-honored and important process. I think of it as a small adventure. Enjoy the trip!
Tim Rowell BostonBanjoTeacher.com