I had a great, great conversation with some some very new friends who happened upon my humble website and let me know about their success. I was very excited that two people “got it”!
I get a lot of requests to do “this, that and the other” when it comes to frailing or clawhammer banjo. Some of it is right up my alley for what I want to accomplish and others are not what I want to do.
I started this site and my videos for one reason. I wanted to to what others didn’t want to do for me. When I started playing banjo back in 1994, I started like many other banjo players. I bought Pete Seeger’s book and started playing his basic strum, up-picking method. I didn’t know anything about playing the banjo except that I didn’t want to play bluegrass or Scruggs style. I wanted to play banjo the way I heard Tommy Makem and Luke Kelly play.
As time went on, I moved to Michigan and fell in love with the way my friend Terry Murphy played his Irish Bouzouki as accompaniment to his singing. He strummed the chords and played the melody making it seamless. This just happened to coincide with the advent of dial-up internet and AOL. I wanted to play something like Terry, but I didn’t want to play the bouzouki. One of the first sites I visited no longer exists, but it hosted mp3’s of people from all over the world playing folk songs that they were recording in their living rooms or home studios. That’s when I fell in love with frailing or clawhammer banjo. For the first time, I heard people from all over the world playing what I wanted to play.
That was the beginning of my journey…
In the beginning, all I wanted to do was play some simple melody to accompany my singing. I could find a part of a song here, another part there, but never the full song with someone showing me where to “find” the melody. I eventually figured it all out for myself and started showing people one on one wherever I went the tricks and techniques that I used.
I was encouraged by some friends a couple of years ago to expand my ideas and show as many people as possible where to find the simple melody of songs. My first love was Irish Folk Songs: Rebel Songs, Drinking Songs, Love Songs, Sea Songs, so I started there.
As time went on, I added generic Folk Songs to the mix and now I can say that I am very, very happy everytime I get an email or message from someone that says that they figured out a song from one of my videos.
That’s what I do…..
I love to show the first steps, the simple melody, the beginning of someone’s adventure with the banjo. I dont’ show anything more advanced than a hammer-on or pull-off. Once in a great while, if I think it will add to the song, I will throw in a phantom hammer-on, but that’s it.
My technique is not the end all or be all of banjo playing, it’s the first step. All you need to follow the videos is the ability to do the basic strum and switch chords. I try to find the simplest melody out of the chord forms so someone at home can play along and “get it”.
That’s why I was so happy today when I met some guys who “got it” right from the beginning. They “got it” and moved on. One found me over a year ago and has now moved on to playing fiddle tunes. That made my day. He plays and sings with his family and now joins in with a group playing fiddle tunes! That’s growth and that’s how you learn.
The other one now plays regularly with her church. She took the ideas that I gave her for Folk Songs and finding the simple melody and put them to use with the Hymns at church! That is fantastic!!!!!
The best advice I can give anyone is to play and sing, have fun and try to learn from as many people as possible. You don’t have to like everything that someone does in their teaching or style, but if they have something you would like to learn, do it! Take what you can from as many sources as possible and incorporate it into your own bag of tricks. When I am playing with Another Pint, I love to make the guys laugh on stage, so I might suddenly play a blues guitar lick on the banjo during a solo. (Check out how similar the tunings are between Open G tuning and a standard tuning on guitar – with a little thinking, you can adapt some great stuff).
I didn’t learn that from anyone, I just saw a guitar player doing an electric blues solo and said to myself, “he got all that sound out of three frets and four strings, I could do that”. Try anything you like on the banjo and if it works, keep it, if not, try something else.
Play, love, learn, do, repeat, repeat, repeat….
I don’t end every video with those words just for the heck of it. I believe in them. Play the song. Even if you can’t play the simple melody yet, play the song and sing it out loud. To me, that is the single best way to train your ear.
Love the song is very important. If you love the song, you will WANT to play it. If you don’t care about the song, you won’t “stick with it” if it’s difficult in the beginning.
If the first two fall in line, Learning the song will come next. You will be amazed that once you stick with it for a little while, you will learn it and have it.
The reason that I say “repeat, repeat, repeat” is that you don’t want to lose what you have just learned. When you go over it again, again and again, it becomes part of you. And the dirty little secret is that you don’t have it do it on every song. WHAT?
It’s true, believe me, I’m not kidding you. Once you have a couple of songs under your belt, the next ones start to come easier and easier. Soon you will be in a jam with some people and pick out a melody from a song you’ve never heard before. It’s true, it happens to people all the time. I have just been blessed enough to be there and see it happen for the first time with a few people……That’s what I do.
Take Care and God Bless,
Kelly
Everyone,
