a cute banjo teacher moment
Dec. 6th, 2019 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2OTkQSr
So I’ve been taking banjo lessons since… like… February? I don’t remember now, I’d have to look it up.
The teacher is a guy who for his dayjob, works with disabled kids. He said the official title and I didn’t understand it, so I’ve kind of just filed it away– point is, he’s an educator. I had assumed he worked in music education but no, he does some music therapy work but I think it’s all sideline gigs and his main job is not music-related. He does banjo lessons one or two nights a week for about… there’s four of us on Thursdays, and then some little kids, two or three… anyway, he teaches guitar too but currently doesn’t have any guitar students. He’s a very sweet kind of guy, gently eccentric, with a gently eccentric wife I’m quite fond of as well (she is constantly in the midst of something really bizarre when we come over, something different every time, too).
For these last few months he’s mostly been teaching us basic stuff, and then getting us to remember it by teaching us various songs. (Confusingly, Dude and I both have extensive band experience at woodwinds, so our idea of learning a song is being given sheet music with a single part we have to follow, and our teacher’s experience is largely playing in jams and so he’s decided we don’t do sheet music anymore, and both of us have been Utterly At Sea ever since, but treading water gamely.) So we have a stable of like, six or seven songs, by now, that we know both lead and backup parts for. Anyway, we recently finally made it to our first of the monthly jam sessions he runs, which are attended by his students but also by other interested players, and we discovered that we don’t actually know enough to play along with most of a jam; we only really know three chords, and bluegrass has a stable of chords because it’s often played on an assortment of instruments. Banjos love to be in G so that’s the one we know, but most fiddle tunes are in D or A and mostly the banjos are expected to transpose.) So that was illuminating. Last week he taught some basic music theory stuff to Dude, and then this week he re-taught it to him and to me too.
Banjo’s super easy, it turns out, if you know three basic shapes to hold your hands in to make a chord, and then you can do little sets of chords per song with those three shapes, and in basically any starting position, you can make chords that have the same relationship to one another by following the same progression of shapes. (I think that was his point, but it turns out you have to know the exceptions by memorization, and well, it’s not that simple, but it’s almost that simple and it’s a good starting point to learn to be comfortable with it, anyway.)
So he was trying to think of examples to show us how songs go. Because the ones we already know mostly all go 1, 4, 5, 1 (the numerals being the root of the chord, on the first note of the octave and so on, easier to hear than explain, though I’m not sure I got that progression right, I just know what shape it is). So he was playing us examples, and couldn’t think of one that modulated to a minor even though it’s incredibly common, and suddenly his eyes lit up and he said, “the one about the secret chord!” and I was like “the first, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift?” and he was like bingo, and then showed us how to play about half of Hallelujah on the banjo, and Dude does not know the song somehow and was baffled. But, it turns out, you know, Leonard Cohen was pretty knowledgeable about music theory and in fact did write a pretty good exemplar of a good chord progression for banjo-teaching theory.
So I’m probably going to teach myself the rest of that song and I promise not to Pentatonix it.
Also it is several years until I’ll be able to master the picking part of Blackberry Blossom but I know the chords to it too, because it has almost all of them, it turns out. LOL.
So I’ve been taking banjo lessons since… like… February? I don’t remember now, I’d have to look it up.
The teacher is a guy who for his dayjob, works with disabled kids. He said the official title and I didn’t understand it, so I’ve kind of just filed it away– point is, he’s an educator. I had assumed he worked in music education but no, he does some music therapy work but I think it’s all sideline gigs and his main job is not music-related. He does banjo lessons one or two nights a week for about… there’s four of us on Thursdays, and then some little kids, two or three… anyway, he teaches guitar too but currently doesn’t have any guitar students. He’s a very sweet kind of guy, gently eccentric, with a gently eccentric wife I’m quite fond of as well (she is constantly in the midst of something really bizarre when we come over, something different every time, too).
For these last few months he’s mostly been teaching us basic stuff, and then getting us to remember it by teaching us various songs. (Confusingly, Dude and I both have extensive band experience at woodwinds, so our idea of learning a song is being given sheet music with a single part we have to follow, and our teacher’s experience is largely playing in jams and so he’s decided we don’t do sheet music anymore, and both of us have been Utterly At Sea ever since, but treading water gamely.) So we have a stable of like, six or seven songs, by now, that we know both lead and backup parts for. Anyway, we recently finally made it to our first of the monthly jam sessions he runs, which are attended by his students but also by other interested players, and we discovered that we don’t actually know enough to play along with most of a jam; we only really know three chords, and bluegrass has a stable of chords because it’s often played on an assortment of instruments. Banjos love to be in G so that’s the one we know, but most fiddle tunes are in D or A and mostly the banjos are expected to transpose.) So that was illuminating. Last week he taught some basic music theory stuff to Dude, and then this week he re-taught it to him and to me too.
Banjo’s super easy, it turns out, if you know three basic shapes to hold your hands in to make a chord, and then you can do little sets of chords per song with those three shapes, and in basically any starting position, you can make chords that have the same relationship to one another by following the same progression of shapes. (I think that was his point, but it turns out you have to know the exceptions by memorization, and well, it’s not that simple, but it’s almost that simple and it’s a good starting point to learn to be comfortable with it, anyway.)
So he was trying to think of examples to show us how songs go. Because the ones we already know mostly all go 1, 4, 5, 1 (the numerals being the root of the chord, on the first note of the octave and so on, easier to hear than explain, though I’m not sure I got that progression right, I just know what shape it is). So he was playing us examples, and couldn’t think of one that modulated to a minor even though it’s incredibly common, and suddenly his eyes lit up and he said, “the one about the secret chord!” and I was like “the first, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift?” and he was like bingo, and then showed us how to play about half of Hallelujah on the banjo, and Dude does not know the song somehow and was baffled. But, it turns out, you know, Leonard Cohen was pretty knowledgeable about music theory and in fact did write a pretty good exemplar of a good chord progression for banjo-teaching theory.
So I’m probably going to teach myself the rest of that song and I promise not to Pentatonix it.
Also it is several years until I’ll be able to master the picking part of Blackberry Blossom but I know the chords to it too, because it has almost all of them, it turns out. LOL.
