(I’ve Lost Count! Being a banjo player, it’s hard for me to go above five!)
Anyhow, here’s the tip: Wear your picks!
I’m not kidding. One of my students was not wearing his picks to practice because he has a young daughter who was usually trying to sleep when he was playing. So, like a good father, he tried to keep the noise level down. By playing with his bare fingers.
The trouble was, when he came to his lesson I made him wear his picks. So he’d spend the first fifteen or twenty minutes just getting used to them. Naturally, he was not playing his best during this interlude. (Of course it gave him a wonderful excuse!)
Yesterday he came in and was playing great right from the start. What’s up? I asked him. Are you practicing more?
He allowed that he was practicing more, but, he said, I’ve started wearing my picks to practice. He controlled the noise by seriously muting his banjo—with a homemade bridge mute and a towel in the back. Viola! Little to no banjo noise, even when he used his picks to play. Daughter happy, student happy, Murphy happy. We had a very good lesson!
P.S. (After I saw his banjo mute I asked him if he’d seen the T-shirt with the picture of a sledge hammer on the front and the words “Banjo Mute” underneath. He had.)
Tags: murphy, practice tips
AH HA! He should wear those picky picks.