I’m a lapsed banjo student. It’s on the stand and I play it from time to time but it’s not something I work on regularly.
If the volume gets to be too much you can take the resonator off (it’s probably attached by thumbscrews) and stick in some old t-shirts or whatever. You don’t want to have to hold back and play dainty because you’re afraid of driving someone nuts.
I didn’t find it terribly difficult to get started. It’s in an open tuning and has fewer strings than a guitar, so the math is easier :). One thing I like to do is just do rolls or whatever picking pattern on the open strings, lay a finger down here or there, see what happens.
I started on a Washburn and moved up to a Goldtone BG-250. My big inspiration was Bela Fleck’s Drive album.
My teacher asked me what kind of tunes and sound I liked and tailored my lessons towards that, so that helped keep me interested.
Out of interest, three years down the line, how is the banjo playing going?
I ask as I went for it a few months ago. I’d been toying with the idea for ages, but got talked into it by a friend. The weird thing is I wasn’t really into banjo music, I just liked the sound. Of course now I am listening to a fair amount of it …
So I went to Jam here in Stockholm (jam.se) and had a chat. Not knowing what I really wanted or what I wanted to play, the poor guy did his best to help me and I ended up with one of these fellas:
And a copy of Earl Scruggs’ book and some fingerpicks. Over the past few months I seem to have come to the conclusion that I prefer clawhammer (it feels more “old man sitting on the porch”, which is kind of an idea I like), which is now making me think I should have gone for an open backed banjo instead. Even right now I am playing with a mute on the bridge so as to not annoy the neighbours too much.
So right now I am trying really hard not to buy my second banjo in four months.
It’s going pretty good. I’m not much of a musician yet though. I think some people have it, and some don’t.
I had taken a 3 week vacation, and when I got back I played a lot. Gave myself Tennis Elbow (tendonitis). The only thing that helped was to not play at all for about 6 weeks.
I had a banjo teacher that I saw once a month. He was a great player, but I thought lacked teaching skills. I dropped him.
Toying with getting another instructor, the logistics with where I live are kind of tough though. I should probably look to do online stuff. But that’s a little tough too. I have a ridiculously limited internet connection.
Nice. I’m doing it completely teacherless, which means I am going to end up like I am on guitar after twenty years: crap with loads of bad habits. After a few months of Scruggs-style going to Clawhammer has been a revelation. I so prefer the sound.
A friend recently found a bluegrass jam night in a pub somewhere in Stockholm, so I think I am going to have to go and check that out. Not to play at first, but just to get the feel.
You can remove a resonator, or remove it, stuff a wadded up hand towel in the cavity, and then reinstall the resonator. Or you can clip a mute to the bridge. If you can’t find a banjo mute, a violin/viola mute should work.
I tried banjo for a while. I learned a couple of rolls from a book and could do a fair job on “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” and “I Saw The Light”. I never managed to learn the roll for “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”, though. I have a feeling FMB is like an F chord on a guitar; if you learn it, you’ll continue on to learn more, but if you don’t master it, you’ll set the instrument aside to collect dust and say “I used to take lessons on it” rather than “I play it.”
In my long history of learning to play the guitar, the biggest obstacle I faces was that I had try to go cheap on an instrument and struggles for years with an essentially unplayable guitar.
I don’t want to repeat that mistake with a banjo, but I also need to keep my banjo purchase within budget.
I have been told that a Washburn B9 is a good compromise on quality and price.
Yeah, I bought a mute off Amazon. Unfortunately it also changes the tone of the instrument, with it ending up sounding not far off a normal guitar. I’ve thought about removing the resonator, the fear of just totally fucking up the instrument is probably the only thing that has stopped me.
I’ve always felt that if you go with an established brand, even their cheap stuff will be usable. The worst guitars I’ve played have been ones from brands I have never heard of. Including my very first acoustic, which gave me the same struggles that you talk of.
amanset, I am from Sweden and currently waiting for my first banjo ever to arrive from Germany. My experience with instruments? Zero, zilch, nada. I just want to tame the sound of this instrument, it speaks to me.
Look forward to seeing pictures posted of the dusty instrument collecting dust on the wall in a couple of months time.
I invested about 7 years into the banjo. Had a Gibson MT Scruggs and a Deering Calico. I could play all of the standards and practiced a minimum of an hour a day. Unfortunately, my hands simply never could develop that rolling speed that is necessary to playing Scruggs style well. I used to soak my hands in FlexAll for arthritis, but there was just no getting past it.
Third or fourth on putting a T shirt inside the resonator.
The Deerings are absolutely excellent, but I have not messed with banjos in probably 8 years now. Don’t forget…everyone knows banjo jokes and will not hold back from using them on you.
An instrument that is struck is a percussion instrument. Drums, chimes, xylophone, piano are all percussion instruments (a hammer strikes the piano string). The banjo is a string instrument.
Before taking on the banjo you’d probably be better off to learn the guitar first, or even a ukelele.
Deering Good Time is the best model under $600 without a doubt in my mind.
And you definitely don’t need to learn guitar or uke first. They would certainly help as you progress to gain understanding of certain things from a different perspective but I have had more students be successful with banjo as a first instrument than any that had beginner to early intermediate guitar skills.
Interesting. I’ve heard that similar things happen with languages. For example, it is pretty easy to gain a basic competency in spoken English but it takes decades to become a good speaker who can naturally and fluently navigate around all the idioms, exceptions, exceptions to the exceptions, exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions, and general oddball quirks that litter the language. Japanese is easy to learn to speak but it takes forever to become fully literate. Other languages, like Spanish, are much more linear in terms of how much ability you get out of each study or practice session and you can pretty much assume that if you’ve studied it for two years and decide to go on and study for another two years, you’ll probably double (approximately) your abilities. English has that plateau where once an English as a Second Language student gains a roughly high school level of fluency, it becomes increasingly more difficult and arduous to show even a marginal improvement.
