They Ought to Have a Name for It – The Speed Limit

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Phill Gibson

This is closely related to JIT Failure, mentioned last time in this thread, but only happens when you are learning a new song and, naturally, are playing it a good deal slower than full speed. What seems like a perfectly reasonable sequence to perform with your right hand picking fingers at a slow speed soon becomes an impossibility as you increase speed. Usually, what appeared as a slow pair of sequential thumb picks speeds up to reveal a much more demanding sequence. You have to go back and relearn that part using a different picking finger for one of those notes.

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They Ought to Have a Name for It – JIT Failure

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Phill Gibson

You’re playing along with an improvised break and you just used that right finger or thumb when you realize that you need it for the very next note – a JIT Failure. JIT stands for ‘Just In Time” and is a standard concept in IT and manufacturing. The idea is to not waste storage space for things in inventory; just have them at the very last moment and so minimize the expense of overhead. Our picking fingers are just that way as well; we need them at that exact instance, and not before. But if you’ve just used a particular finger, you can’t use it again if you’re playing fast!

What I like to be able to do when this happens is go ahead and make room for the quarter or half note rest that ensues, and work that extra bit of delay and syncopation into the break somehow. If you can pull that off, it actually sounds even nicer; no small part being due to the spontaneity of it.

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They Ought to Have a Name for It – Thumb Pick Purgatory

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Phill Gibson

This is so annoying when it happens to me. It tells me that it’s time to practice some more of the basics for a while. It’s when your pick gets caught on a string on the upswing. It brings your break to an abrupt halt until you get the pick extracted. What’s even worse is when the string not only gets caught on your thumbpick, but also finds its way up under the edge of the upper part of your thumbpick. I’ve also had that happen.

Even that is not the worse, though. Imagine if that string not only got caught up under the thumbpick, but it pulled it all the way off as you pulled your thumb away; leaving it there to dangle in abject humiliation on a now silent string. Horrors!

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They Ought to Have a Name for It – The Song Race

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Phill Gibson

Here’s a small series of blogs on various things that happen to banjo players. See if you can identify with any (all?) of them!

The first one is…

The Song Race

As a new banjo picker, you’re still struggling with getting your rhythm just right. It’s all too easy to pick up speed as a song goes along. So here you are in a jam session. You’ve played your first break reasonable well and the mandolin player does a break. He’s pretty new as well. Then maybe the fiddler (also a newbie). They also need to work on keeping a steady rhythm, but the mandolin and fiddle can speed up easier in this situation than a banjoist or guitarist can.

Then, the break comes back to you.

By this time, it has gotten awfully fast – so fast, as a matter of fact, that you can no longer keep up! What do you do? The most useful thing to do is just laugh about it and gracefully end this “song race”. Live and learn.

I’ll post some more over the next couple of days.

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Wil Huckabay's 'Cut n Paste' Method

Posted on June 28, 2009 by Phill Gibson

I recently obtained a copy of “Building Blocks for Bluegrass Jamming, Volume 1” by Wil Huckabay of Hardin, Texas.

As Wil explains in his introduction, this is a book not so much about learning to create a melody for a song as it is about learning to survive in a jam. Bluegrass Jams are among the most unusual social events around. Several people have written on the process whereby musicians who have never met can get together and be playing wonderful tunes in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.

To those unaquainted with Bluegrass music, this is a bewildering and fascinating thing, indeed! Wil Huckabay gets right to the point in his book and offers up a tried and true technique he calls the ‘Cut n Paste’ method. The name is new, but to any seasoned professional musician, these techniques are standard fare for becoming proficient with improvisation and jamming. 

Wil offers a CD with the example licks in the book, plus something I’ve not seen in a banjo tab book before: cut-out lick cards: basically one lick per business card-sized card on thick perforated paper. These are handy as you are learning a basic repertoire of licks that are essential to survive in a jam. Although you wouldn’t use them in the actual jam, to have them on a card means you can drill on them to help get to the point of having them at your instant command later.

A good look at substituting licks is also presented and it clearly explains how not every lick can be married to just any other lick; the fingerings have to sync as well.

This is a good sized book for learning in a small amount of time; the entire book is about 32 pages and you could go through and learn these basic licks to add to your repertoire in a few days. If you’ve not mastered the basics of jamming, then this is the process to learn. And it’s all right here in a book specific to the topic of jamming basics alone.

I’d recommend this to anyone wanting to go beyond the basic techniques of 5-string banjo (3 or 4 rolls, G, C and D chords, a beginning song or two) and move into being able to effectively interact with other musicians in a jam.

You can find Wil’s book here at Angie’s Banjo.

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Technique, Style and Significance

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Phill Gibson

I get a lot of material for these blogs while driving down the road. Seems nothing frees your mind quite like traveling down a road, even if it is a busy one. Before I know it, I’ve a new idea to blog on!

Today was no different; I was going to the other side of town and I was thinking of a recent CD I bought. It wasn’t a very well-known work, and after hearing it, I realized that there were lessons for me to learn about what to value in music as well as what not to value.

Certainly we can value a banjo in other musical contexts than strictly bluegrass, old-time, or jazz. But I see a pattern here, regardless of musical style. Ponder these statements; mull them over in your mind for a while and see if you agree.

Technique Serves Style

Style can be defined as an overarching pattern that characterizes a subset of a musical genre. In other words, we can recognize a particular style by listening to the predictability of the elements that compose it: rhythms, voicings, motifs and the variations on these techniques and how they are handled. Even the message conveyed by the song can be a part of that style.

All of these various techniques are applied to the song in that particular style. Change the techniques and you have changed the style. Think about all of the remakes of well-known songs you have heard. Ofttimes, the remake is in a completely different style, or even a different genre. “She Thinks I Still Care”, by George Jones, is a good example. Jones recorded this as a country song before  James Taylor redid it as a popular soft rock song. Many songs we know in one style would just as easily fit into another style or genre, if we could just hear it differently in our minds, but that is the difficult part for most of us.

Change the technique and you can change style, or even genre; but change genre or style and you must change technique.

Style Serves Significance

I’m thinking of this relationship a good deal differently from the relationship between technique and style as mentioned above. Here, it has more to do with the outcome of what a musician does with finished products – songs. A carefully crafted and well-thought-out style serves a musician well by making his or her works a matter of significance. Conversely, to have a style that does not compliment your goals and abilities is to be counterproductive, thus decreasing your musical significance.

Develop your style and your efforts increase your musical significance; neglect it and your efforts become less significant.

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Know When to Drop a Bad Break

Posted on June 21, 2009 by Phill Gibson

As you advance in your banjo-playing skills, you’ll often be coming up with your own breaks (and backups) to various songs. Maybe you’ve tried your hand at songwriting and like it. Maybe you’re simply adding depth to your own coverage to tunes – livening up your breaks with new embellishments, or even coming up with your first version of a song you’ve always meant to work up, and you’re finally getting around to it.

Whatever the route you’ve taken towards original works, you’ll inevitably come face to face with one – a bad break. You’ve created it – you get the credit, or the blame, as the case may be. Maybe you’ve even played it a good deal already, stubborn to the fact that it raises more questions than it answers, so to speak.

I remember the first truly bad one I came up with. I had been playing about a year or so and thought I knew it all. I did my take on Rocky Top. In looking back, it does over-do the whole concept of power on a banjo and makes the second half of the break (where the mandolin takes a lead in the Osborne Brothers version) into a tour-de-force of musical misunderstanding.

Well, I can look back on it and laugh. We all gain wisdom as we age. If we don’t, perhaps we don’t get older?

It takes a bit of humility to admit we’ve either missed the mark in what we were trying to convey, musically, or else we’ve hit the mark, but were wrong in what we were trying to convey in the first place.

Either way, that’s the time to back up and redo your efforts. Perhaps it needs further development, but I suspect if you’re like me, it really needs simplifying; I believe the ‘bluegrass banjo thought process’ tends to makes us want to fill all available spaces with too many notes, leaving out the well-timed rest notes that are so essential to syncopation. We banjoists could take a cue from guitarists and pianists in that regard; ofttimes, less is more.

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Béla on the Cover of Downbeat

Posted on June 20, 2009 by Phill Gibson

Have you noticed that Béla Fleck is on the cover of the June 2009 issue of Downbeat magazine? He’s also on the cover of Banjo Newsletter for the same month. Amazing – I heard that this is the first time a lone banjo player has been featured on the cover of Downbeat. Perhaps that should read a 5-string banjo player? Surely a tenor player or two has been on the cover before – I don’t know.

Notice that banjo slung over his shoulder on the Downbeat cover? Do the frets number more like a tenor, despite the fifth string? It’s a bit of a large drum head as well. He’s holding his Goldtone Cello banjo. One of my students has this same cello banjo model and it’s very nice. It makes you want to start arranging three part harmonies for piccolo, standard and cello banjos!

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Saturday Afternoon Banjo Jam at The Coffee Tree

Posted on June 14, 2009 by Phill Gibson
We’re starting a
Practice Banjo & Bluegrass Jam Session
at The Coffee Tree Books & Brew
across from Grissom High School!

These will be on the third Saturday of each month and the first jam session will be Saturday, June 20 from 4:00 – 5:00 pm at The Coffee Tree Books & Brew across Bailey Cove Road from Grissom High School in Huntsville, Alabama. Here’s a map in a new browser page. It’s geared towards anyone wanting to learn better jamming skills. It’s primarily for my bluegrass banjo students, but anyone is welcome and encouraged to bring an instrument: guitars, mandolins acoustic basses, dobros, harmonicas and fiddles are most welcome! Also, you don’t need to be a student of mine to attend.

As we practice at home and in formal lessons, it’s easy to get accustomed to playing in a vacuum. And yet so much of the learning experience in music is accomplished with the direct interaction only found in a live jam session!

The purpose of these jams sessions will be:

  • To give you more hands-on experience with playing in a live, yet stress-free, setting. No one’s going to throw tomatoes!
  • To introduce students to a wider variety of bluegrass, folk, jazz, etc. songs for possibly learning in the future.
  • Lastly, it’s a great way to meet other students!

So, join us – it’s for everyone, whether you bring a banjo, guitar or other instrument to play or just want to watch and learn!

Contact me at Phill@PhillGibson.com if you have any questions.

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Google Trends

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Phill Gibson

Have you checked out Google Trends yet? It’s a powerful way to find comparative information from data on Google.

For example, let’s say you’d like to know if there is more buzz on the internet about Scruggs style banjo playing or melodic style banjo playing.

Go to Google trends at http://www.google.com/trends and type your terms (from two to five different terms) in the form field, separated by a comma:  

Scruggs banjo, melodic banjo

 You’ll get a chart showing a summary of all the Google data concerning these topics that people have searched for on Google. It also shows how often these terms have appeared in Google News, and it divides the summary up.

Wonder if folks have been talking more about Earl or Tony Trischka over the past few years? Try:

Earl Scruggs, Tony Trischka

Or check out this search for some other interesting tidbits:

Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe

Here, you’ll  see two very popular terms and a lot of peaks in the chart. Notice the dates are at the bottom of the chart. To see what events some of the peaks coincide with, just look at the Google News chronology to the right of the chart; this shows which news items were current during some of the peaks in the chart. Cool!

If you put in terms, one of which is not a very searched-for phrase, it won’t return any data, Try this search and you’ll see: 

Scruggs style, melodic style

You can find out all the specific details about how it works at http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html.

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