Hi I’ve been playing the banjo about 5 years now & have leaned quite a few tunes by note & I get to play a lot with others but when I listen to my own playing it sounds very rigid & has little swing or lilt to it especially in jigs any help would be much appreciated thank’s
Without hearing you play, it would be impossible to give you specific technique advice. Therefore, the usual general advice will have to suffice. Listen to good players, play along with good players, buy some lessons. Can’t go wrong with those 3 solutions.
What was it the Lovin‘ Spoonful said way back in the ’60’s? “Anyone of those Nashville cats can play twice as better than I will.” I guarantee you, no matter how poorly you think you play banjo, you haven’t heard me play mine. The cat fights outside are more enjoyable. It does look right nice hanging up on the bookcase with the other instruments though!
Been playin’ since they’s babies ….
Record yourself practising and listen back regularly.
I agree with Aaron’s comment above. There might be specific technical issues (e.g. picking technique) which, if addressed by a good teacher, could set you on the right track. But as far as ‘swing’ or ‘lilt’ is concerned, there is no substitute for listening to good players (and not just banjo players - all instruments) and playing with good players. You can experiment with different note emphases and time ratios, but the rhythmic feel really only comes when you stop needing to think about it.
callison: “Anyone of those Nashville cats can play twice as better than I will.” I guarantee you, no matter how poorly you think you play banjo, you haven’t heard me play mine…
I haven’t heard you, Banjoman72, or callison, but I agree in principle with that comment. If you are listening to the best players, you will inevitably not compare favourably to them (yet). Five years is not a long time - if you are playing the right notes and keeping time, then you’re doing OK. The important thing is that you keep improving.
Two additional suggestions: if you can, try learning some Irish dancing. Nothing like movin‘ to the groovin’ to help you get the feel. second, try lilting the tunes. (They don’t call it diddley for nothing.)
I play banjo too. To have it “swing” you need a lot more down strokes than up strokes, especially jigs. For practice try doing a tune with all down strokes, it’s a good way of getting comfortable with following a down stroke with another down stroke. As for jigs the basic pattern is DUDDUD. Reels can be DUDU but you start triplets (and rolls) with a D and the next note that is not part of the triplet is a down, so DUD D. This will get you started. Contrast this with bluegrass which is DUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDU etc.
Unless you play three finger style. In my case, jigs are often (not always) TI and DUD UDU. Triplets are TIM with the thumb coming down for the following note.
I once ran into a group of Welsh singers while playing the harp, and they said something wonderful.
The Welsh, they said, don’t play the harp… they SING the harp.
Rather then getting all bogged down by a sea of notes, a fistful of techniques and attending worries… sing the tune in your head as your playing. Make your fingers do what your mind is hearing. The goal isn’t making perfect notes, the goal is making music. If you listen to enough players you become so familiar with the idiom that you will find yourself playing what you hear. Listen listen listen..then sing sing sing; it teaches your mind what you want your fingers to do.
Great advice WireHarp. I often let technique get in the way of the music!
“captacoustic” - I may be wrong, but I think you’re talking about the wrong kind of banjo. [ 3 posts above ]
Kenny- I may be wrong too, but I believe that captacoustic plays tenor banjo finger-style, and very well, too.
“ I believe that captacoustic plays tenor banjo finger-style, and very well, too.”
He does indeed. I have heard him play.
If you think about it, if you can play 3-finger style on a 5-string (where you are often playing trebles on a single string) you could do the same on a tenor banjo.
Thanks for the nice comments guys. Still a work in progress!
I can understand how Kenny thought I was playing a five string.
Jim, did we meet at a session?
banjoman - I feel your pain. You will hear a good deal of advice on learning how to correctly pick jigs as mentioned above, and if you can invest the time in learning DUDDUD, you will appreciate it in the long run.
Or, you can fake it like I do. I learnt this music in a vacuum with no exposure to correct technique for nearly 10 years. All I had were my ears to tell me what jigs and reels were supposed to sound like. So, I listened to a ton of players of all sorts of instruments and tried to mimic the lift and bounce I heard in their playing.
Hopefully, you will be able to employ both concepts (correct picking and absorbing the feel by listening) and really be able to soar with your playing in the very near future. Good luck!
Thanks everyone for your comments I do play with and listen to good player’s regularly that’s what’s driving me to improve. I think I’ll try to learn my next jig duddud but I might be to far down the dududu road to change .
It’s never too late, Banjomnn72. I had been playing mandolin for about 5 years without ever giving much thought to pick direction when, after reading discussions on the subject both here and on Mandolin Cafe, I decided to give my picking technique an overhaul. I spent a couple of weeks just practising, not playing out in sessions, paying attention to every pick stroke and correcting myself if I deviated from the pattern. At first, when I started playing out again, I struggled to play at all, but after another week or so, it was paying off.
I made the switch from picking jigs DUD UDU to DUD DUD at about 2 years in, and it felt like it was ruining my playing for a while. It’s really hard to pay attention to pick direction AND notes AND swing, and keep everything together. Ultimately, it just takes some time to internalize the DUD DUD pattern to where it becomes second nature and then you never need to think about it again (except that it makes playing triplets in jigs more difficult, because you either have to pick 3 down strokes in a row at the beginning or end of the triplet, depending on where you put it, or you need to alter your picking pattern for a second, or you need to pick the triplets starting with an upstroke - all three of which can be a challenge.) But it can be *really* helpful for putting some lilt into your jigs, because the physicality of doing it kind of forces the natural rhythm of jigs, where the first note is longer, the second note is shorter, and the third note is in between the two in length. And it can help with some better dynamics of the notes as well - because the “important” notes (1 and 3) are picked with a down stroke, which gets emphasized a bit just because of gravity and even more because of the physical mechanics of our hands.
Another thing I work with my students on is playing tunes with different amounts of lilt or swing. You can practice exaggerate the swing by playing reels like a hornpipe or jigs like a 6/8 march. And you can practice playing as straight as possible, and then practice playing somewhere in between. I remember being in Ireland when I had been playing about 5 years. I was able to play fairly fast by then, and had a decent repertoire. But I found that many of the sessions I tried to play in, I couldn’t keep up. I had some recordings from those sessions, and checked the tempos, and in general they were within my range, but the thing that I had trouble matching was the swing, which was different than how I played at the time. So it’s really important to be able to play with flexible amounts of swing to match what other people are playing. And that’s something that you can practice.
And finally, I would point out that a step which many players never get beyond is relying too much on “muscle memory” to play tunes. Relying on the so-called kinesthetic memory is something that helps get a player over the problem of trying to memorize 128 notes in a specific order. We play a tune enough, and it becomes easier, and requires less concentration because of the familiarity with the finger patterns of each tune. But a lot of players seem to sort of stop there. They can have a tune under their fingers, but it will be a pretty rigid setting, which they faithfully regurgitate when asked, playing the same notes and same ornaments every time. If you can focus on moving the tune from “under your fingers” to “in your mind”, and just rely on the kinesthetic memory to remember how to play notes and ornaments on your instrument, then you can control the tune more. You can play it with more or less lilt. You can add or remove ornaments without getting lost. And ultimately, you can enter the realm of expressing the underlying musical ideas in the tunes eloquently, using melodic variation, dynamics, subtle timing changes, slides, double stops, and left hand ornaments all as part of your expression.
Preach it Rev!
Banjoman, no less a player than Kieran Hanrahan plays jigs DUD UDU:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trhcoI_yvjk
Dude, I just realized I’m struggling with the same thing with reels. I’m a long time bodhran player, and I’ve always been great at matching whatever rhythm is in front of me on the drum. But apparently it’s another thing *creating* a solid rhythm with good swing, or lilt, on the banjo, and I’ve been defaulting to a really straight reel rhythm with a big emphasis on the 1 and 3. It’s so easy to default to a really steady DUDUDUDU pattern, and it’s REALLY easy to have a very strong 1 and 3 in that, somewhat harder for me to get an easy 2/4 offbeat pattern (more like a duDuduDu), especially when the tunes speed up.
I also realized it’s something different for me to play WITH someone (easier) than it is to lead the rhythm on my own (harder, and I tend to play more straight).
Just had a lesson tonight with a fiddler who gave me that feedback, and it was so helpful to realize I needed to figure out how to swing. So I’m going to be working on single string picking exercises, and moving into tune fragments and whole tunes once I have that part down. Sort of building up as the rhythms get easier and more automatic. I’ve been practicing a really front-heavy reel for so long I think it’ll take a while.
Anyway, just thought I’d share because I’ve had a similar struggle.
Two things: (1) If your muscles are tense when you play then your playing will sound tense in one way or another. What you are calling “rigid” might be a result of tense muscles. Try slowing down and getting your body loose before playing any faster again. (2) Making the music what Morris musicians call “danceable” is the reverse of rigidity. Someone has suggesting dancing but you don’t have to dance yourself. Play for dancing or play along with someone who plays for dancing and listen to the beat all the time and think about the movement of the feet. I put on YouTube videos of dancing sometimes and play along with them or put the sound off and just play to the feet. You have to make space in the music for the movements of the dancers and you can encourage them to be spirited by surging to the bigger movements and snapping into the fast ones. Sometimes you have to slot in half a beat or lose half a beat. It makes you feel your music differently.
One thing I don’t like about plectrum banjo playing is the remorseless use of tremolo (rapid repeat of notes, not vibrato) wherever there’s a gap; little burst of machine gun fire. Really makes it sound mechanical. A tired old cliche.
OK as the occasional decoration but not all the time!
And yes to dancing - tap a foot at least, and get a bit of a pulse going.
Each to their own .I play a basic jig rhythm as D-d Udu. (R-r Lrl) So Dud Udu (Rlr Lrl) or D (Dud3) Udu . That way the first beat is emphasised and the back beat less so .
For me swing comes from not playing rigidly on the beat but playing in front of or behind the beat and by rests , breathing points so to speak.
Also rather than maintain the basic rhythm i.e. In my case R-r Lrl (D-d Udu) there are certain places where string crossing calls out more , like an arpeggio might call for sweep picking on a serious of down strokes.
I don’t actually think rigid patterns are the way forward, learning aids yes, but it’s music and the tune itself should dictate how it’s played in a way.
Also to bring Variations in they could be picked DddUuu or Uuu Ddd or Udu Dud or Udu Udu DduDdu orUud Uud then any combination…….
For me phraseing is the most important thing so the picking can be used to phrase a number of bars together and also sometimes not picking but hammering on etc can be used to delineate and stress certain areas.
Rather than look at a tune as a string of notes I’d rather think of them as songs, so vary the phraseing each time through as though the lyrics change create a variable flow. So rather than all 1/8 notes use longer notes and rests to effect.
So really the way the melody flows indicates where and what techniques are used rather than the other way round.
“ I don’t actually think rigid patterns are the way forward, learning aids yes, but it’s music and the tune itself should dictate how it’s played in a way. ” Yes. Yes. Yes.
I am pretty sure that it is an elephant, but I have never seen, smelled or heard one.
But I’m sure I would recognise an elephant if I tripped over one.
Been playing banjo for about the same length of time as you banjoman (after quite a few years of mandolin, mainly bluegrass, old-timey). After listening to recordings of myself, I also find my playing frustratingly rigid sounding. And I have a 30 year old recording of myself playing Blackberry Blossom on mandolin and it sounds smooth. Why? Who knows? HOWEVER the one change I have made in my banjo playing that has idisputabley improved my playing as far as rhythm and putting just a bit swing into it, has been to switch to a DUD DUD picking pattern for jig time tunes. I made the change a couple of years ago, it was surprisingly easy, and now I use it without thinking. So my recommendation for what it’s worth is make the change if you haven’t already. I also think the comment made up thread about trying to keep relaxed is key - now if I could only figure out how to do that…
Thanks skinnyman I think I will try to settle myself & try & change to duddud. Did it take you long on the jigs you already knew ?
I’m with Will Evans on this - every tune is different, and the emphasis, phrasing, and ornamentation may be unique to each tune. Any kind of formulaic or pattern-based recipe is not going to work well in all situations. It is therefore better to interpret the tune in your own way, trying always to stay as close to the tradition as possible. Listening to a lot of music, and a lot of players - even on different instruments than yours - is crucial in developing a sense of what sound is ‘traditional’.
To each his or her own preferences - if the music sounds good, then what you’re doing is probably working, if not, you may need to try something different. And constantly trying different ways of doing things anyway might not be a bad idea.
