YouTube Classic Banjo Videos
I was hanging around the Banjo Hangout this afternoon and read an interesting post about a video. What would make this video of great interest to banjo players, you ask? Great Banjo players, of course.
Earl Scruggs, J.D. Crowe, Alan Munde, Sonny Osborne, Don Stover, and Bill Emerson and a few more great players all take a turn at Foggy Mountain Breakdown. Wow!!! Usually, I can come up with something to say, but Wow!! does the trick here. This video is a study of different techniques and is really worth watching closely.
Here’s the link: Great Banjo Players!!!
I thought I’d round out this post with a few more YouTube links.
Del McCoury delivers for Amazon.com?
Ralph Stanley – Clinch Mountain Backstep
Take some time and watch these videos, you’ll definitely learn a lot.
The great new Tony Trischka book is available. Click on the image below to BUY it.
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Minor Chords for the 5-String Banjo – Part One
Minor chords are characterized by a sad or sorrowful sound, and they add a lot to a chord progression. I am going to dig into a bit of music theory to help you better understand minor chords, and how to use them.
Let’s take a major chord and turn it into a minor chord – We’ll start with a G chord. The G chord is made up of three notes – G, B and D; these notes are also the first, third and fifth notes of a G scale. A minor chord is formed by flatting the third, or lowering the third by a half step. So a Gm or G minor chord consists of G, Bb and D.
When you play in the key of G, the most commonly used major chords are G, C and D – but what is the most common minor chord in the key of G? That chord is E minor (Em) – of course there is a reason why Em is the most common. The sixth note of the G major scale is E – it’s minor chord is called the relative minor. Em is the relative minor because the Em scale has the same notes as the G scale.
As with the major chords – there are different ways to form minor chords. Let’s take a look at Em first; it is composed of three notes: E, G and B. In this case you only need to fret two strings, the 1st and 4th at the second fret. these two notes are both E and the open strings are G and B.
Bluegrass Music on the Internet
The world has changed forever – music is distributed by downloading, and the days of going to your local record store and picking up a few albums are long gone. There are literally millions of songs available on the internet and Amazon.com is an excellent source for music in both the old fashioned form – CDs, or the more modern MP3 format. Clicking on the picture above will take you to Amazon.com, where you can buy Ricky Skaggs tribute to the fathers of Bluegrass – way to easy.
When I was younger, I loved buying a new record and bringing it home to listen to. This was a ritual for me, no there isn’t any sacrifices or anything involved; I would tear the plastic open, pull the inner sleeve out and put the album on the turntable. Now the fun starts – sit back and listen to side A in it’s entirety, that’s right the whole side – no skipping songs. The nature of a record dictates that skipping tracks was difficult, so it was easier to listen to every song. While I enjoyed listening to my new find, I occupied my visual senses by reading the liner notes, learning about the instruments they used, the producers name, where it was recorded – information that gave me a feel for the recording. I would stick with one side for a while and when I was ready, and no sooner, I gave side B a listen.
Like I said earlier – those days are long gone, and now you can download one song for less than a buck and avoid the ritual that I love so much. Progress – I think not. Anyway, if you wan’t to check out an endless list of music in both Cd and MP3 format – follow the links below, but beware there’s a lot of good music out there.
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