The Murphy Method Blog

Today, I just thought you folks would like to see an old photo of us from 1979. This picture was so colorful and entertaining, with all the instruments in it, that we used it on the front of a 33 1/3 record album (remember those?) which we recorded that year.

The permanent band members at the time were just Murphy and myself and her sister, Nancy Pate. For the photo we surrounded ourselves with all the bluegrass instruments we had– and there were a lot of them. The five banjos include Murphy’s old Gibson Style 4 which she played for 20 years, and also my then-recently-completed Style 11 conversion which belongs to Casey now. (She was almost two when this picture was taken—imagine that!) The guitars include four Martin D-28s of various ages, and the mandolin-family instruments include Randy Wood F-5 #1, an old 1916 Gibson F-4, and my Gibson H-2 mandola. There are plenty of fiddles of various kinds, too.

Sadly, hard times were about to hit the bluegrass world and the rest of the country too. In the recession of 1979-81, we sold many of these instruments and they went to other homes. But in the meantime, we sure did get a good picture!

Mark, who has been taking banjo about six months now, and I had an interesting discussion at our lesson tonight. Mark said he’d been watching clips of really good banjo players picking on U-Tube and he noticed that all of them look at their left hands and none of them look at their right hands. Mark, on the other hand (no pun intended, I swear), looks at his right hand exclusively. He told me that he thinks this is hindering him from picking up speed. He’s afraid he’ll never be able to play fast if he keeps looking at his right hand. I told him I knew what I’d be blogging about tonight!

Initially I wasn’t too concerned. After all, he’s still a beginning player and he’s really doing well. He’s a little over the one song a month average and he can vamp and come in off the vamp for his breaks. What’s not to like?

But then he told me that when he’s looking at his right hand he’s actually thinking of the strings he’s hitting, as in 4,2,3,1/5,3,4,1. (That’s the double square roll, usually in C chord.) Then I got concerned. Because if he’s thinking of the individual strings, then, he’s right: he’ll never be able to play fast. You don’t want to be doing the Cripple Creek lick and thinking 3,2,5,1.

So, of course, I then asked him to play something easy and NOT look at his right hand. He played “Banjo in the Hollow” and, while it was really hard for him not to look at his right hand, he could do it. Ditto “Cripple Creek” and even “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” The songs even sounded smoother to me.

I told him that since he obviously could play the songs without looking at his right hand, what he was doing was pure habit. Is it a bad habit? I’m not sure. But since Mark was concerned, I told him to start out with easy songs, play them slow, and make himself look only at his left hand.

He told me that in just trying not to look at his right hand on those three songs he was already experiencing quite a bit of anxiety.

I told him that he shouldn’t do anything that would disrupt his playing, since even looking at his right hand he was already doing very well. I reminded him that this was supposed to be fun, not torture.

He told me that he thought he’d try not looking on some songs. But that for the rest of the lesson he was going to have to look.

I told him that would be fine.

So, I think Mark has a legitimate concern. I relate it to you as something to think about. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT get yourself all tied up in knots if you, too, happen to look at your right hand. DO NOT ruin your playing by trying to fix something that might not need fixed (as we say here in the Shenandoah Valley). In Georgia we say “might not need to be fixed.”

Although I have not run any kind of study, I suspect that most people who play banjo long enough eventually stop looking at their right hands.

Stay tuned to the Murphy Method Blog for updates on Mark and the question “to look or not to look?”

And me? I look at my left hand!

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!!

We recently sold our old Dodge band-van, one that had carried us to many performances years ago. The van had been with us for 23 years, but it was time for it to find a new home.

Talk about nostalgia! We bought this van new in 1985, when Casey was 7 years old and Christopher was 4. This new van was larger and longer than our old one, and I had a high, white fiberglass top installed on it to make it easier to change clothes in at the shows. We had a full-time 5-piece bluegrass band back then, and we drove the new van all over the country. Along with going to a great many shows in our home area of Florida and Georgia, the van carried our “Red & Murphy” band to perform at festivals and concerts as far away as Louisiana, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maine, and even Canada. The van got a lot of miles on it in just a few years.

After we moved here to Virginia and shifted our musical emphasis to running the Murphy Method, we still used the van a lot. We drove it to play many shows back in Florida and Georgia, as well in other states, and Murphy loaded it up with Murphy Method tapes and advertising for the IBMA convention each year. But finally we quit doing much traveling, and the van became my personal car for some time. Then after Christopher reached age 16, he drove the van during high school. After he finished school and moved away I began driving it again, because the van’s endurance, and the durability of its Dodge 318 V-8 engine, were phenomenal. However, as gasoline prices kept rising along with maintenance costs, I couldn’t justify driving it forever, and it finally sat in the driveway most of the time. It had over 260,000 miles on it, but I didn’t want to let it go.

Then, just a few weeks ago, opportunity knocked. A man living near here said he wished he had that van, to fix it up and use it as a camping vehicle for himself and his own kids. So we made the transaction, and now the old van has a new life. But I took a couple of pictures before it left us. Here they are:

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.

[This is my Banjo Newsletter column from May 1986. It did not, in fact, make it into my book. Guess there wasn’t enough about banjo playing in it! I reprint it here to share with you my first glimpse of Dalton Brill’s Barber Shop where I’ve taught for the last 22 years.]

Well, folks, greetings from the thriving metropolis of Winchester, Virginia! WE HAVE MOVED! It’s over! It’s done! No more following a 24-foot U-Haul truck through the mountains at 25 miles per hour! No more wandering around in Columbia, South Carolina, looking for Interstate 77! And no more wondering whether we are going to like this house that we have just committed a lifetime of payments to. We love it!

But, why Winchester? Well, now, I’m not really a big believer in signs but….on our first visit to Winchester, back in December, naturally one of our first concerns was to find a place where I could teach banjo. I mean, first things first. Not four blocks from the house where we were staying [with David McLaughlin], there it was: Brill’s Barber Shop and Musicians’ Shop—Specializing in Bluegrass and Country Music. Now I have taught at several different music stores in my time, but none of them has ever mentioned the word “bluegrass” in its logo, marquee, or advertising. That was Sign #1. Red and I went in and were introduced to the proprietor, Dalton Brill, who, being between haircuts, was sitting down playing his banjo. (Sign #2.) It was a Gibson. (Sign #3.)

Now in order to understand Sign #4, which is a biggie, I will have to digress for just a moment. On Christmas Eve, John and Lynn Hedgecoth [Red’s uncle and his wife, both musicians] came over to our old house in Hawthorne, Florida, to exchange gifts, see how much our kids had grown, pick a little, and gossip about Prominent Bluegrass Musicians. John just happens to be one of the best banjo players in the world. In between Bill Monroe stories, he was wandering around looking at all our books. He came back and said, “Is that a Don Reno Instruction Book you have? I’ve never seen one.”

“No,” I said, “that’s a Don Reno Song Book. I traded Don Wayne for it up in New Jersey. I didn’t know Don Reno had published an instruction book.”

“Oh, yes,” said John. “I’ve always wanted one.”

“Well, if I ever see any,” I said, “I’ll get two. One for me and one for you.”

So what do you think happened? Up in Winchester the very next week, I walked over to the rack of music books in Brill’s and found a whole slew of Don Reno Banjo Instruction Books. And that was Sign #4. I bought two.

(more…)

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!

Dalton Brill - April 10, 1935-October 29, 2008

Read the Winchester Star article on Dalton from October 31, 2008.

Brill’s Barbershop is where Murphy’s Misfits originated.

Murphy’s current group of Misfits at their jam on November 1st, 2008:

Photos by Ellen Zimmerman.

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.