dragonlady7

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marksbirch https://birch.co/post/12556705478/foggy-mountain-breakdown-by-lester-flatt-and-earl :

Foggy Mountain Breakdown by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs - This is the instrumental by which the skill of any banjoist is judged. It is the equivalent of playing Eruption for the rock guitarist. This is one of the all-time classic bluegrass tunes and was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Recording Registry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recording_Registry.

For the record, Scruggs innovated a new banjo-playing technique, which is showcased in this piece. It’s called “three-finger style”, “bluegrass-style”, or “scruggs style”, because he invented it, for bluegrass, and because you pick with three fingers. So if you’re wondering how he can hit notes in such quick succession, it’s because three fingers have metal picks on them.

I’ve studied this style. I took lessons for six months. The teacher started us on one of the riffs from this song after three months, because it’s a good demonstration of technique and if you do it right, you can build up to a pretty good speed faster. This is, in fact, the song you basically always have to play in auditions, and if you know how to play it right, you’ll have a much better result than if you’ve tried to figure it out by listening. (The secret is which order you use your fingers in. For the beginning riff, if you alternate your fingers, so that you play it differently on the two repeats, then you’re optimally positioned to play the next bit without having to use one finger twice in a row. That’s it, that’s the fundamental truth of the three-finger style; you never use the same picking finger twice in a row, except rarely in a double-thumb technique where, just like it sounds, you’d pick twice in a row with the thumb.)

No, I can’t play this song.

If you’re wondering, the more traditional banjo-picking technique involves using your fingernails, and is called “frailing” or “clawhammer” style, and involves fingers and thumb alternating on the upstroke and downstroke. It’s not nearly so metallic or mechanical-sounding, but it’s also slower and tends to be a bit blurrier.