The Murphy Method Blog

Today I have a favor to ask of you loyal TMM Blog readers. I’m working on redesigning my own website for a class that I’m taking, and adding a working store to it. If you’d care to take a minute to check it out and let me know what you think, I’d really appreciate it. It’s not all built yet (there’s only one item in the store!) but there’s enough there that you can get an idea of what it will look like. All comments welcome. You can leave them below, or email them to themurphymethod@gmail.com.

Thanks!!

For those of you who couldn’t come to Dalton’s service, but who wanted to, here are some pictures from the memorial pickin’ we had at the shop the afternoon after the funeral.

Dalton Brill’s barber pole.

Picking in the shop. L-R: Murphy’s student Logan on banjo (you’ve read about him in previous blog posts), Murphy on fiddle, Red on mandolin, Gerald Crowell on guitar at right.

Murphy picking “Under The Double Eagle” on Dalton’s banjo.

Bass player Marshall Wilborn, one of Dalton’s Wildcats, taking in the music.

Wildcats David McLaughlin and Chris Henry.

Some of Dalton’s barbering implements. Note his CD, prominently displayed.

Dalton’s sharpening strop.

We’d like to bring your attention to the November issue of Banjo Newsletter magazine. It is the 35th Anniversary issue, celebrating continuous publication since the first issue in November 1973. It features all sorts of history and reminiscences about the magazine, including a tab from the very first issue, and many tributes to founder Hub Nitchie. All the columnists reflect on their years with the magazine and Murphy returns to write her “On The Road” column. Especially exciting is the long-awaited return of the Flint Hill Flash, intrepid reporter from the Flint Hill community in North Carolina, where everyone plays banjo and wants to pick like Earl. If you’ve never read BNL before, this is the perfect issue to start with. Call them up (800-759-7425), subscribe, and ask them to start you with this special issue.

On Monday we received this question from a student:

At least with what DVDs I have of yours I don’t recall seeing or hearing anything about learning scales on the banjo. Could you maybe post about scales on your Daily Blog? Thanks!!

This student is correct in that we don’t teach scales on any of our DVDs, with the exception of the Blackberry Blossom (aka Medodic) Video. We don’t teach them because we don’t consider them particularly relevant to Scruggs-style playing (again, with the abovementioned exception). Because the banjo uses rolls, it gets the melody in a different way than the other instruments (guitar, mandolin, fiddle) that play liner melodies. We do still use the notes that are in the scale, but it is more useful to think in terms of licks, which work nicely as independent pieces that you can then move around and use in different songs.

Learning and practicing scales will not help you develop the skills you need to play with other people in a jam session or to improvise with licks, and those are our goals for all our students. So, unless you are the kind of person who really likes scales (some people do, I can’t imagine why), don’t worry about them.

Now, if your aim is to play the banjo in a more progressive (think Noam Pikelny), or melodic (Bill Keith), or jazz (Bela Fleck) style, then you definitely should learn all of your scales–all twelve keys, major and minor. But I don’t feel that many of our Murphy Method students fall into that category!

One of my students and I just had a very productive conversation about minor chords. Minor chords can be hard, but they’re really neat once you get the hang of them. As I was telling my student, there is a simple way to get to the minor chord from each chord shape (bar, F shape, D shape—you have to know those shapes already for this to make any sense to you. We have an excellent video on vamping if you haven’t branched out into that area yet.  :-)  ).

In the bar chord shape, you lower the note on the second string one fret. (I finger it with my little finger on the 1st string, index on 2nd, ring on 3rd, middle on 4th.)

In the D shape you lower the first and fourth strings one fret. (Little on 1st, ring on 2nd, index on 3rd, middle on 4th.)

In the F shape you lower the third string note one fret. (I flatten out my index to cover the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd strings and don’t use my middle at all, leaving little on 1st and ring on 4th.)

Chord stuff often doesn’t make any sense until you’re ready for it, or unless you have a need to use it right away. But at the right time, it will suddenly start to click, and it’s really cool when it does.

This week one of my students ventured out to her first public jam session. She had previously jammed only at group lessons and at the FiddleStar/Murphy Method camp that we held last month. She has been playing just about a year and went to this jam with the intention of just vamping—not taking any leads. She was pleased to find that on most songs she could figure out what the chords were, by paying attention to the guitar player’s hands, and keep up pretty well.

She ran into a stumbling block on “Old Joe Clark.” They were playing it in A (that’s where it is always played), but because we banjos play it in G when there are no fiddles around, she wasn’t sure of the chords. She knew that when she played OJC in G the “off chord” is F. So when she tried to use that chord, only in the key of A, it sounded wrong. Someone leaned over to her and told her she needed a capo for OJC.

She wasn’t using a capo since she wasn’t playing lead, and a capo doesn’t make any difference to your vamping anyway, but it confused her. So here was the simple solution: when you’re vamping in A, you move everything up two frets from where it is in G. She had moved her regular chords up, but she forgot to move the off chord up, too! Problem solved.

In thinking about right hand position, which I wrote about on Friday, I thought I’d dig out some pictures to show the variation in how people’s right hands look. This first one should need no explanation or identification:

(That’s Earl!) In an ideal world, everyone’s hand would look just like this. But, it’s not an ideal world and people’s hands look all sorts of different ways.

J. D. Crowe at a show in Kentucky, April 22, 2001. I wish I’d been able to zoom in more, but my little camera would only do so much.

Here’s someone you don’t see pickin’ the banjo very often: that’s Bluegrass Unlimited editor Pete Kuykendall at the Maryland Banjo Academy, April 18, 1997.

And this is yours truly, from early 1998, playing my Stealth banjo. I still have that flannel shirt…just sold the banjo, though.

One of my students is currently working on changing her right hand position to get better accuracy and tone. Changing one’s right hand position is not something that should be taken lightly. Generally students will naturally fall into a position that is comfortable and relaxed, and that works fine. You have to have three key points:

1.) Fingers anchored on the head (at least one, either pinky or ring, is OK).

2.) Wrist arched. It should look like a bridge.

3.) Forearm resting on the armrest. It’s what it’s there for.

Outside of those criteria, there is a lot of variation in how people’s hands look. The most important thing is that you are striking the string right down the middle of the pick (it should wear a shiny place). Also, your hand should not have any tension in it, and your fingers should not be flying all over the place; they should stay reasonably curled.

Changing your position after you’ve been playing a while is a huge undertaking and should be approached cautiously. Like I told my student, play everything slow. Play nothing fast until your new position is well established, or you will immediately revert back to your old position. Make sure you play through ALL of your old material with this new position. And do not introduce any tension into your hand, wrist, or arm, even if you think it looks/sounds better. It will hurt your playing in the long run.

Here is an interesting thing I ran across a couple days ago. Last week I posted a photo of the Virginia band Goldheart in my post about IBMA, Day 2. Over at the Bluegrass Blog, Brance captured me capturing that shot and posted it here. Pretty nifty.

At Thursday night’s awards show one of our favorite banjo players took home the award for Banjo Player of the year: Kristin Scott Benson. Kristin plays with the Larry Stephenson Band and is the second woman to take home the title, the first being Alison Brown in 1991. The other nominees in the category—Earl Scruggs, J. D. Crowe, Jimmy Mills, Ron Stewart— were unbelievably stiff competition.

Kristin was modest enough to think that it was a fluke that she was nominated at all, so when she won, she was very surprised. She gave a great speech, giving lots of credit and thanks to her parents, who were in attendance that night because her husband, Wayne Benson, was taking care of their son Hogan.

Dale Ann Bradley took home Female Vocalist of the Year for the second time in a row.

Kristin and Dale Ann were the only women to take home awards this year, although Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’s song “By The Mark” won Gospel Recorded Performance of the Year.

The before and after parties were great fun. This is FiddleStar/Murphy Method Camp co-host Megan Lynch and myself:

And here is Lynn Morris and Bass Player of the Year nominee Marshall Wilborn, who presented the awards for Vocal Group and Album of the Year:

The dress I’m wearing was made by my grandmother for my mom’s Junior-Senior prom. It was a pretty big hit, I have to say. Last but not least, here is me with my brother and fellow TMM instructor Chris Henry: