12/12/2023 0 Comments Roustabout banjo tableditHe also says he'd include a picture of one of the great West African musicians singing and playing the Kora! For the first chapter I think I'd show the pattern I learned from old Bascom Lunsford." (i.e. And: "What I call here 'the Basic Strum' I think I'd call 'a simple strum' and teach it not at the very beginning, but somewhere later on. He says he never found time to revise it yet again, but that if he did, he'd start with the open-G, rather than the (standard) C-tuning. ![]() Folk musicians do this, however, in order to play tunes that would be impossible otherwise.I learned originally from a Library of Congress Record, though by now have gradually changed it a good deal.Treat it freely, and don't copy me note for note." Which was, and is, sterling advice! For those who started playing banjo (or are even now starting to play) with the help of earlier editions of this manual, I'll add a few comments Pete made in 1962. But here's a bit from 1948 not in the 1962 edition: "Remember, you have to change all your chords now, to compensate for the change. ![]() In my own (1962) 3rd-edition-revised, under the heading Harmony Lesson: "Mountain Minor" Tuning, Pete uses as an example of this tuning a version of "East Virginia" based on the playing of Walter Williams. Having mentioned Art Rosenbaum, who has made such important contributions to our understanding of old-time banjo styles and tunings, I feel I can't omit a few words, at least, from Pete Seeger, without whom, and whose ground-breaking manual, many of us might never have discovered the fabulous five-string. Paul Schoenwetter (Banjo-List member) actually used (!) the "Submit a Tuning" form to send me a quotation from Pete Seeger's 1948 mimeographed 1st edition of "How to Play the 5-String Banjo". It merely unpacks some of the bare bones. The appended file doesn't get into the reasons. There's an enormous variety of "reasons" - musical necessities or conveniences, traditional contexts, personal choices or chances - bearing on any banjo-tuning or (just as important, when it comes to "atmosphere") pitch. Each tuning has its own area of technical and expressive usefulness based on the kinds of melodies or chords it makes possible and on its sound, or the feeling it communicates.The old timers themselves have great respect for the power of the tunings to evoke moods." Or what Wade Ward called "atmospheres". ![]() As Art Rosenbaum wrote, in "Old-Time Mountain Banjo": "These tunings are one of the great achievements of the anonymous musicians who developed the folk styles of banjo picking. It went on from there and as it went, I made notes of the different banjo-tunings I came across. Soon after that, I found the County "Clawhammer" series. This recording, which started as a project to document traditional ways of tuning the 5-string, just knocked my doors off. Introduction: One of the first records I stumbled upon, when trying to learn something about the "old-time ways", but very much in isolation from the real thing, was a second-hand copy of John Cohen's remarkable "High Atmosphere". ![]() Tunings 5-STRING BANJO TUNINGS Compiled by Anita KermodeĪn alphabetical index to these tunings can be made to appear in the side frame (window) on this website (assuming you're viewing it that way).
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