The Three P’s

March 12th, 2010
Murphy Henry

Murphy Henry

I suppose you’ve all heard of the three T’s for banjo: Tone, Taste, Timing. When I was driving home the other day after working out I was thinking about banjo playing and banjo teaching and this thought occurred to me:

Most of the questions that students ask can be answered with one of the Three P’s. And these all start with the word PLAY:

PM: Play More

PS: Play Slower

PWOP: (pronounced “pee-wop”): Play With Other People

Think about it. More on this subject (perhaps) later!

(I thought I’d use this when I didn’t have time to do a long blog!)

Posted in By Murphy, General | 5 Comments »

New Custom Lessons Available

March 11th, 2010
Casey Henry

Casey Henry

Just a quick update on a few new custom lessons I have recently done that haven’t yet made it onto the complete list. Today I just taped a lesson for Earl’s break to “Pearl, Pearl, Pearl.” If you’re not familiar with that tune, you need to watch more Beverly Hillbillies.

“Faded Love” is also ready. That’s a popular tune with fiddles, but tricky to play on the banjo. I think I’ve come up with a playable break that most intermediate students should be able to handle.

Two variations for “John Hardy.” This standard is a staple of the beginning banjo repertoire, so it’s understandable if you’re sick of the one break that we teach on the Beginning Banjo DVD. These two breaks (one low, one high) are the ones that Murphy recorded on the Stelling Banjo Anthology CD. They’re definitely harder than the regular break, but totally doable.

And to complete the list, the walkdown and high break for “Earl’s Breakdown,” and a tune called “Sasha.”

If you’re interested in copies of any of these ($30 per song), just email me: themurphymethod@gmail.com.

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When Something’s “Just Not Right”

March 11th, 2010
Red Henry

Red Henry

Do you ever pick up your banjo or guitar or mandolin to play it, and you know that somethings “just not right?” Especially if you haven’t been playing for long, you might not be able to put your finger on what the trouble is. You might just know that you’re not comfortable playing the instrument, and it just doesn’t sound right or play right. Well, chances are that you’re NOT just making it up. Something really is wrong, even if you can’t put your finger on it.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a student pilot now, trying to get my pilot’s license. Well, I went out to make a solo flight last Monday. I was assigned an Cessna 172 that I’d flown before, but not recently. And from the time I sat down in the pilot’s seat, I just didn’t feel comfortable. I started the engine and took off, and everything went normally but it “just wasn’t right.”

I decided to make a landing or two before heading out to the practice area. The airplane felt awkward in the landing and as I let the nosewheel down onto the runway, suddenly the whole plane started shaking loudly: BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG, and it didn’t stop. I thought the nosewheel had gone flat. We often get what’s called “nosewheel shimmy” after landing, but this was ten times worse than that.

Well, I did get the airplane off the runway, and after that it acted better and none of the tires were actually flat. I taxied back to parking and reported the trouble. I suspect that the nosewheel strut is badly out of adjustment. I had just KNOWN something was wrong with that airplane even before takeoff, but I didn’t know what it was. I found out when it was time to land. It wasn’t dangerous, but it was inconvenient! To me, something had happened to the airplane invisibly, and my hands and mind had been trying to tell me.

Something analogous happened to one of Murphy’s banjo students recently. He knew that something had gone wrong with his banjo, but he wasn’t able to tell just what it was. He knew he wasn’t comfortable playing it any more, and the action had come up, but that was all he knew. So after his lesson, I took a look down the neck — yep, it was pretty bowed. I took off the adjustment rod cover and got a socket-driver to adjust the nut. Sure enough, it had worked loose. I let down the string tension, tightened the nut, and brought the strings back up to pitch. The neck was straight and the action was back low again. Must have taken me at least three or four minutes. But to the student, it was quite a problem. It was something that had happened invisibly to his banjo.

When you pick up your instrument and start to play, your hands and mind send you signals. If it all just doesn’t feel right, there may be something wrong! Get your teacher or an instrument-savvy friend to take a look and see what might be wrong. If something’s “just not right,” it might not just be your imagination!

Red

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Playing in D

March 10th, 2010
Casey Henry

Casey Henry

This post kind of parallels our playing in C discussion of the last couple of weeks. Students never ask about playing in the key of D until it comes up in a jam and they realize they don’t know how to do it. There are three or four ways you can play in the key of D. The easiest is to capo at the seventh fret and play your regular G breaks. But it sounds very tinky way up there on the neck.

Option #2 is the second easiest, and that is to capo at the second fret and play out of C position. Now, you’ll need to have learned how to play in C position for this to work, but it’s a great option once you’ve crossed that hurdle.

Option #3 is to play out of open D position. This requires no retuning, except for your fifth string (which goes to an A note—the seventh fret spike). But playing out of D position is a whole level harder than playing out of C. I remember when I was trying to learn how to do it, the first break I attempted was “I Saw the Light.” I took my C position break and moved it up two frets, imagining that my fingers were the capo at the second fret. I just literally moved every single note up two frets. It worked (kinda) but it was very hard.

I was listening to a lot of the Del McCoury Band at the time and the banjo player Rob is particularly good at playing out of D. One time at a festival I asked him if he had any tips for learning to do it better and his answer was, in effect, just do it a lot and play around with it. It wasn’t a terribly helpful answer but it was accurate. By the time you get good enough to be playing in D, you’re also good enough to figure out how to do it by yourself. I was kinda bummed that there were no shortcuts.

Option #4 is almost not an option at all, but I’ll throw it in just for the heck of it. You can play in D tuning (like the tune “Reuben”). Almost nobody does this as a way to play normal, everyday tunes in D. Except Keith Little. He does it, and it’s awesome. Because you’re in a different tuning, all the chord shapes are different, even if many of the rolls are the same. It’s (almost) like learning a whole new instrument, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

For the most part, I’d say stick with option #1 until you have several years—like ten—of playing under your belt. It’ll get you by and won’t make your brain explode.

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Posted in By Casey, banjo | 4 Comments »

Picking the Wildwood Flower

March 8th, 2010
Murphy Henry

Murphy Henry

I am having the best time teaching my 20-year-old guitar student, Cody. He’s been taking now for not quite a year, and he and his dad Elvis are the wonderful folks who plow our driveway when it snows. (I’ve seen a lot of them this year!) Cody started off learning G, C, and D, of course, and then we ventured pretty quickly into E, A, and B-7 so he could learn “Folsom Prison Blues.” To quote Travis Tritt, Cody is a “member of the country club”, and country music is what he loves. So we’ve also done “A Country Boy Can Survive” (in D), the theme song from the Dukes of Hazzard “Just Good Ol’ Boys” (in E), “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound,” (in G) and are working on Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.” (Don’t expect to see these on a DVD any time soon!)

One of the things Cody does that is really helping his playing is, guess what? Getting together with other people and playing. Of course, they play electric guitars and use a lot of barre chords, but that doesn’t matter. Cody is still immersing himself in music. Early on he came back from one of these jam sessions and said one of the guys was picking out a song he really liked. What was the song? I asked. Cody couldn’t remember the name. I took a not-too-wild guess and said Does it sound like this and then picked a little of the “Wildwood Flower.” Bingo!

So we spent the next month or so learning to pick “Wildwood Flower” in C. Unfortunately it’s not yet on DVD, so Cody had to remember it a few notes at a time. The F chord in particular gave him fits and evoked some colorful language. (In today’s culture it was pretty mild but Cody has such a flair for it that it always tickles me.) But he “got ‘er done” and now plays it quite well and is able to trade off breaks with me easily.

Which brings me to the whole point of what I thought was going to be a short blog! Yesterday when Cody came for his lesson the idea came into my head to show him how to pick “Wildwood Flower” in the key of G. (I wonder now if that was inspired by all the blog talk here about banjo players playing in different keys.) Anyhow, we started learning the first line in G, following the same melody we used in C. After the first couple of times through Cody looks up and says, “Wow! That’s a lot of moving!”

That struck me as funny and oh-so-appropriate, so I wrote it down and thought I’d share. And I did! (I would have shared earlier but I was out yesterday square dancing! Four hours! My feet hurt when I got in and I was hearing “four ladies chain” and “weave the ring” in my sleep. But, oh my gosh, it was so much fun!)

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Double the Fun

March 5th, 2010
Casey Henry

Casey Henry

This week I’ve had the distinct pleasure of seeing two duo shows, both featuring the banjo. Sunday night the Fiddle and Pick in Pegram, Tenn, hosted Bill Evans and Megan Lynch, a.k.a. BEML. I’ve seen them do their duo thing on at least one previous occasion. It is great and hilarious. They always make a joke out of how many different banjos Bill feels the need to carry around the country with him. At this show three different banjos made an appearance: his Granada, a cello banjo, and an electric banjo that actually sounded really cool. I’m not generally a fan of electric banjos, but this one totally worked.

Megan Lynch, singing the awesome song about the boxer Sonny Liston, accompanied by Bill Evans on electric banjo. Yes -- electric banjo.

Megan Lynch, singing the awesome song about the boxer Sonny Liston, accompanied by Bill Evans on electric banjo. Yes -- electric banjo.

Megan does most of the singing and much of the pithy stage banter while Bill mostly tunes. JUST KIDDING! Bill has pithy stage banter, too. And sings. Actually, when there are only two people on stage, there is little space for tuning. You can’t just step back from the mic during a song to touch up a string that has slipped. You have to roll with it. For the sake of the show you have to pretend that absolutely nothing is wrong, even if one string is making you cringe. The audience mostly can’t tell the difference, and the people who CAN tell the difference understand exactly what it going on.

Megan Lynch and Bill Evans, with the cello banjo.

Megan Lynch and Bill Evans, with the cello banjo.

On the last song, Bill’s third string slipped and was noticeably flat. He didn’t even flinch a little bit. It was exactly how an out of tune instrument should be handled. I was watching and wondering, though, what he was going to do about the final note. They were in G, so that third string was going to be the last thing we heard. When he got there he did what I was hoping he’d do: played it on the fifth fret of the fourth instead of the open third. In tune!

BEML, or in this case, MLBE, which doesn't sound nearly as cool when you try to say it.

BEML, or in this case, MLBE, which doesn't sound nearly as cool when you try to say it.

BEML has been touring a lot lately, so if they’re near you, or a couple or four hours away, so see them! They often do some sort of workshop in conjunction with their show—education and entertainment in one package. Such a deal.

The second duo act was the relatively new pairing of Ned Luberecki and Stephen Mougin: Nedski and Mojo. They played the relatively new Wednesday night radio/live show at the Loveless Café called Music City Roots. It’s broadcast on WSM and has a format similar to the Grand Ole Opry. The two-hour show had five acts. Jim Lauderdale was the host, Eddie Stubbs was the radio announcer, and journalist Craig Havinghurst did short interview segments with the artists during the stage set-up time.

Stephen Mougin and Ned Luberecki

Stephen Mougin and Ned Luberecki

Nedski and Mojo’s segment was only three songs long, but they packed a lot of entertainment into a short time. Stephen is an amazing singer and guitar player, and Ned can do just about anything on the banjo, but what sets them apart is their sense of humor. They sang Ned’s original song, “Cabin of Death,” which, as he says, is the perfect bluegrass song since it features a cabin, family, a hill, and people dying. I’ve seen him sing it many times now, but this time it had an added bonus: the perfect banjo lick bit.

While Stephen keeps time on the guitar, Ned explains about the perfect banjo lick, which is the choke that starts out the high break of Foggy Mountain Breakdown—the one that is Ralph Stanley’s signature lick. It’s perfect because it will work over any chord, which Ned proceeded to demonstrate: G (yep), C (yep), D (yep). But those were easy. F (surprisingly, yep). Bb (mmmm, a stretch, but yep). B. B? (not so much). The almost perfect banjo lick!

Nedski and Mojo. Yes, they have fun on stage.

Nedski and Mojo. Yes, they have fun on stage.

It cracked me up. And Ned tied it in nicely on the big jam song at the end, which was really loud and raucous because everybody was on stage at once. I could hear Ned over on his end of the stage, wailing away on the perfect lick, and it worked in every chord.

Nedski and Mojo tour sporadically, since they have to fit dates in between Stephen’s regular gig playing with the Sam Bush band and Ned’s regular gig playing with Chris Jones and the Nightdrivers, but they are well worth keeping an eye out for!

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Posted in By Casey, shows | 2 Comments »

More About Playing in C

March 4th, 2010
Murphy Henry

Murphy Henry

Steve from Japan had some interesting thoughts in response to Casey’s comment about my original blog “Playing in C.” I thought I’d post them here, so I can add my two cents worth.

Hi Casey, I don’t mean any fighting words here, but I disagree with your comment about students not needing to learn to play in open C. It’s not that difficult to do and, here anyway, many of the Carter Family songs such as Wabash Cannonball, Wildwood Flower, etc. are played as instrumentals at jam sessions. Also, here in Japan there’s a rather good balance of men and women (singers) in amateur bluegrass too. I’ll be a student of the banjo for the remaining years of my life and I want to learn to play, as proficiently as possible, in the Key of C and D. I think you ought to encourage students to learn to play some in open C as soon as possible. It goes with the territory, so to speak. From the back of the classroom, the bad boy’s 2 cents.

Steve, you do have a good point about women in jam sessions and the fact that most women sing in the higher keys of C or D. That’s why for beginners I suggest the use of the capo. Yes, even in D! And Carter Family numbers such as “Wabash Cannonball” and “Wildwood Flower” are typically played in C. (Although as instrumentals they could be played in any key.)

I think your operative words are “I think you ought to encourage students to learn to play some in open C as soon as possible.”

I agree with this. I just think our definitions of “possible” are different! I am always thinking of the students I see on a day-to-day basis.

Most of the students I see and have seen typically struggle with playing tunes in G for the first couple of years. At some point we start the usually tedious and difficult process of learning to vamp and learning to hear chord changes. Usually, the only playing they do with anyone is with me in the lesson. Most of them do not get out and jam. So their understanding of the banjo and banjo tunes and songs and even basic music theory is quite limited. For these folks, playing in C is, in fact, very difficult (did I mention the F chord?). And more than that, it is confusing.

This is why Casey said, and I agree, that until a student has considerable jamming experience and really needs to play in C because someone is singing in C or playing a tune in C, it is best to wait until the student’s skills are more developed. (Which will also make it much, much easier to learn and understand.) But, I totally agree with you that life-long banjo players do, at some point, need to learn to play in C and D (and maybe even E and F!) to become well-rounded players. That’s exactly why we devoted two whole DVDs to playing in C! Wildwood Flower and Soldier’s Joy.

PS (totally unrelated to the above!): I’ve not yet mentioned that I’ve been taking square dancing lessons since September and am now completely besotted with this mentally challenging activity. (So many new licks….I mean calls to learn: Load The Boat, Spin Chain the Gears, Relay the Deucy, Ping Pong Circulate.) It’s a lot like learning banjo and it’s so much FUN! Anyhow, I’d given our instructor Mike McIntyre one of my M and M Blues CDs, and he liked it and asked if he could use some of my music in a square dance call. I said Sure! So last night I had the mind-boggling experience of square dancing to “Hazel Creek” (the Murphy Method theme song)! I could hardly keep my feet moving in the right direction because I was listening so intently to the music. Mike had cut out the slow introductory part and had somehow spliced together the rest of the song to make it the requisite six minutes long for a dance. (He’d also slowed it down from something like 147 beats per minute to around 126. It was a bit strange to hear it so slow. Yet that was still fast to dance to!)  All the folks at the lesson were very complimentary about the music and I left with my head several sizes larger! Any other square dancers out there??

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Posted in By Murphy, banjo | 2 Comments »

Banjo Art

March 3rd, 2010
Casey Henry

Casey Henry

Yesterday my student Ginny sent me these drawings she did and I immediately freaked out because they’re so awesome. I forwarded them to my parents and they agreed with me about them. Both said, and I quote, “WOW!!” When I saw them, after recovering from the shock of awesomeness, I could immediately picture them hanging on the wall of a baby’s room. You need to start introducing those subliminal banjo messages as soon as possible, you know! :)

pgs 2,3pgs 4,5pgs 6,7back

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“Be Prepared.”

March 2nd, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


Have you ever been in a jam session, and were taken by surprise by something? Maybe the other pickers asked you to play or sing a song. Or perhaps while the group was playing, you suddenly had the tune passed to you–and you didn’t know what to play!

If you’re new to playing in jams, things like that can take you by surprise. If it’s all you can do to watch a guitar player to find out the chords, figure out where they are on the banjo, and then vamp or play some simple backup, it’s hard to do anything else at the same time–such as think about a break to play before it’s your turn. But you can have a plan of action.

Think ahead, and know ahead of time what you’re going to do. If the chords to the tune are pretty familiar and you can use some of your familiar Scruggs licks to build a break, start planning for that as soon as you have the chords figured out. If, on the other hand, you don’t know the tune and don’t want to make a leap into nowhere with your banjo break, just tell yourself ahead of time that if the tune gets passed to you, you’ll just nod to the next person and pass the break off before it’s time to start playing. Whichever you do, the tune will go on smoothly, and you’ll be more confident and better prepared for the next time.

“Be Prepared.”

Red

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Posted in By Red, Improvising, Practice | 1 Comment »

Playing in C

March 1st, 2010
Murphy Henry

Murphy Henry

Here’s a question from Susan: Could one or both of you (Murphy and/or Casey): talk about what you look for in a student’s progress that signals the student is ready to learn to play in a different key, say C?

What Susan is talking about is, of course, playing in C without a capo. It’s not a big deal to capo to the fifth fret and play out of G position.

So, when is it time to tackle a new key?

Roughly speaking, I’d say after you’ve been playing a couple of years, have learned 20 or 30 tunes, and can improvise. In other words, you want to be totally comfortable in the key of G first. I would also add that you need to have some substantial jamming experience.

What do I base this on? I base it on the difficulty that some of my previous students have had in moving into the Key of C. And I also base it on the trouble I had myself. It’s not as easy as it might seem.

Aside: One of my (many) pet peeves as a teacher is hearing that other teachers are using “Reuben” as a beginning tune. Reuben, as you may know, is in the key of D and you have to retune the banjo to play it. Sure, the rolls are easy and are mostly the same ones you use in the key of G. But getting a beginning student to retune a banjo? I don’t think so! (Even with a tuner.) And then the sound that the rolls make in G are so completely different in the Key of D. “Reuben,” in my book, is an advanced tune. And how often does it come up in a jam session anyway?

So, why is it hard to play in the key of C? For one thing, you have to use the F chord! And while you’re holding the F chord down, you often have to move your ring finger down to the second string. Not impossible, just different. And you often are moving from the C chord (three fingers down) to the F chord (three fingers down) and that’s a lot of having to keep your fingers down! There is not so much of that nice open G chord or even the often open D chord. For another thing, the “tag lick,” which is so easy and automatic once you learn it in G, it much harder in C. There is also, generally speaking, much more movement of the left hand involved because you frequently have to go up to the fifth fret first string to get a melody note. And then there are a number of totally new rolls that you have to learn. None of this is impossible, it’s just hard.

Lastly, there is the whole issue of hearing and thinking in a new key, a key in which the G chord is now the V (five) chord, not the I (one), and C chord is now the I and not the IV (four). And then there is the F chord. Oh, I already said that. Well, it bears repeating. Then there is the F chord.

In short, you need to be a fairly competent banjo player in the key of G before you tackle C. There is no reason to make things harder than they have to be by trying to learn them too soon. In the mean time, use your capo!

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Posted in By Murphy, banjo | 9 Comments »

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