banjo update: blue christmas
Dec. 20th, 2019 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2SdzB4K
Last night our teacher taught us Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” on the banjo.
He started playing it, and then was explaining what he was doing as he went, and then explained “I’m teaching it to myself as I go, I’ve never played this on banjo before,” and then proceeded to break it down into a pretty formulaic chord progression and then explain that, since a banjo has no sustain, what you have to do is find 1) the chords, then 2) the melody notes within the chords, and then 3) a method of ornamentation that brings out the melody notes but keeps the banjo playing because you can’t hold a note so if there’s a sustained note in the melody you need to create an ornamentation pattern that accentuates it. So, slides, reduplication (where you fret two strings to be the same note and then play them both within a roll), hammer-ons, etc, all within the framework of the three-finger rolling patterns that make up most of bluegrass-style banjo playing.
It was great, and it’s what I want to learn to do on the banjo, and next month it’ll be one year of banjo lessons and I’m delighted to have gotten to that point.
He then admitted it was unlikely we’d actually master the song in time for the holiday, but reminded us that we’d absolutely have the chords by then, and you can perform a song at any point in the learning process, whether you have all the ornamentation down pat or not.
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convince Dave to bring the banjos with us for Christmas. We’re only going to be gone two days, after all. Not a ton of time for messing around.
Last night our teacher taught us Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” on the banjo.
He started playing it, and then was explaining what he was doing as he went, and then explained “I’m teaching it to myself as I go, I’ve never played this on banjo before,” and then proceeded to break it down into a pretty formulaic chord progression and then explain that, since a banjo has no sustain, what you have to do is find 1) the chords, then 2) the melody notes within the chords, and then 3) a method of ornamentation that brings out the melody notes but keeps the banjo playing because you can’t hold a note so if there’s a sustained note in the melody you need to create an ornamentation pattern that accentuates it. So, slides, reduplication (where you fret two strings to be the same note and then play them both within a roll), hammer-ons, etc, all within the framework of the three-finger rolling patterns that make up most of bluegrass-style banjo playing.
It was great, and it’s what I want to learn to do on the banjo, and next month it’ll be one year of banjo lessons and I’m delighted to have gotten to that point.
He then admitted it was unlikely we’d actually master the song in time for the holiday, but reminded us that we’d absolutely have the chords by then, and you can perform a song at any point in the learning process, whether you have all the ornamentation down pat or not.
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convince Dave to bring the banjos with us for Christmas. We’re only going to be gone two days, after all. Not a ton of time for messing around.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-20 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-21 12:59 pm (UTC)The thing is, I'm at a point where after a year with this thing I need to sit and mess around with it. What I want more than anything is to get to a point with it where I can hear a song and then figure out how to adapt it to the banjo. That's what I want, that's my goal with basically any instrument, and that's what the Blue Christmas lesson was about, and I'm excited about that. The problem is, that doesn't seem to be what Dude wants, and I don't understand what his goal is with the banjo, but one thing is clear: he doesn't want to play along with people or in front of people. It's been sort of annoying this whole time, becuase he'll be practicing and I'll be like oh here let me work on that with you and then he just sits silently waiting for me to be done playing so he can take his turn. I wish it wasn't like that and I suspect that I just have to get a lot better at playing to overcome that, but I don't have time to practice currently in my life.