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Clawhammer Song and Tab of the Week: “Little Birdie”

Click on the button below to get the PDF download for this tab delivered to you, and get 2 new tunes and tabs sent to you every week!

Click Here To Get The Tab


Given the enthusiastic response to last week’s installment of “Last Chance,” (click here if you missed it…last chance! 🙂 ), I’d thought that this week we’d take another excursion into the wonderfully weird world of alternate tunings.

Once again we have another iconic banjo tune, “Little Birdie,” in eCGAD tuning (I’m actually tuned down a half step in the video to d#BF#G#C# to better suit my voice.)

I have not been able to trace the original roots of this tune, so if anyone does know its original source or composer, please share in the comments.

Many in the “first wave” generation of recorded banjo players played it – Tom Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, Pete Steele, and Frank Proffit to name a few. So it seems it had become a standard banjo player showpiece by that era.

In the video I begin with a plaintive rendition, inspired by Chance McCoy’s take on it from the Chance McCoy & the Appalachian String Band album (recommended!), which several folks have requested. And his version was reportedly inspired by Morgan Sexton’s. And around and around we go!

The song is most often played at a rapid clip with a galloping rhythm and sparse fingering. And towards the later part of the video, I present this alternate approach as well (note the emphasis in this part on the up beat, or the “DIT” in the bum-ditty rhythm).

As usual, the different tempos create entirely different feels. Both ways have been tabbed out.

(RELATED: “Little Birdie” is one of 10 tunes presented in the recently released “Magic of Old Time Banjo” module in the Breakthrough Banjo course. Sign up for the course and you’ll also be sent “The Magic of Old Time Banjo” book as a bonus, which contains 20 tab arrangements of 10 of the most iconic banjo tunes in 10 different tunings. Click here to learn more about the book.)


(NOTE: For those considering acquiring a Brainjo banjo, the banjo played in this video is a “Hobart” model. Click here if you’d like to learn more, or claim one in the next batch.)


 Little Birdie (slow tempo version)

eCGAD tuning, Brainjo level 3

little birdie clawhammer banjo tab

 

Little Birdie (up tempo version)

eCGAD tuning, Brainjo level 2

little birdie clawhammer banjo tab

Notes on the Tab

In this arrangement, I’ve tabbed out the part I play in the banjo “solo,” as well as the vocal backup I play on the banjo while singing.

Notes in parentheses are “skip” notes – to learn more about skips and syncopated skips, check out my video lesson on the subject.

For more on reading tabs in general, check out this complete guide to reading banjo tabs.

PRIOR SONG OF THE WEEK EPISODES

  • Episode 1: “Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow”
  • Episode 2: “Gumtree Canoe”
  • Episode 3: “Crawdad Hole”
  • Episode 4: “Oh Susanna”
  • Episode 5: “Freight Train”
  • Episode 6: “Grandfather’s Clock”
  • Episode 7: “Hop High Lulu”
  • Episode 8: “Been All Around This World”
  • Episode 9: “I’ll Fly Away”
  • Episode 10: “Leaving Home”
  • Episode 11: “Poor Orphan Child”
  • Episode 12: “Mr. Tambourine Man”
  • Episode 13: “Swanee River”
  • Episode 14: “Big Sciota”
  • Episode 15: “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms”
  • Episode 16: “Darling Corey”
  • Episode 17: “Battle Hymn of the Republic”
  • Episode 18: “America the Beautiful”
  • Episode 19: “Bury Me Beneath the Willow”
  • Episode 20: “Way Out There”
  • Episode 21: “New Slang”
  • Episode 22: “I Saw the Light”
  • Episode 23: “Amazing Grace”
  • Episode 24: “Blowin’ in the Wind”
  • Episode 25: “Yankee Doodle”
  • Episode 26: “Budapest”
  • Episode 27: “Wildwood Flower”
  • Episode 28: “Paradise”
  • Episode 29: “Mountain Dew”
  • Episode 30: “Blue Tail Fly”
  • Episode 31: “Otto Wood”
  • Episode 32: “Down on the Corner”
  • Episode 33: “City of New Orleans”
  • Episode 34: “Big Rock Candy Mountains”
  • Episode 35: “Come to the Bower”
  • Episode 36: “Old Kentucky Home”
  • Episode 37: “Long Journey Home”
  • Episode 38: “Dixie”
  • Episode 39: “Hard Times”
  • Episode 40: “Corrina Corrina”
  • Episode 41: “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain”
  • Episode 42: “Johnson Boys”
  • Episode 43: “Bad Moon Rising”
  • Episode 44: “Reuben’s Train”
  • Episode 45: “Let the Mermaid’s Flirt With Me”
  • Episode 46: “Rocky Top”
  • Episode 47: “Groundhog”
  • Episode 48: “Lazy John”
  • Episode 49: “The Gambler”
  • Episode 50: “8 More Miles To Louisville”
  • Episode 51: “Who’ll Stop the Rain”
  • Episode 52: “Pretty Polly”
  • Episode 53: “You Are My Sunshine”
  • Episode 54: “Old Molly Hare”
  • Episode 55: “The Miller’s Will”
  • Episode 56: “Walking Cane”
  • Episode 57: “Feast Here Tonight”
  • Episode 58 “Let Me Fall”

Level 2 arrangements and video demos for the Tune (and Song!) of the Week tunes are now available as part of the Breakthrough Banjo course.

Click here for a current list of all the clawhammer songs and tunes currently available inside of The Vault

Learn More About Breakthrough Banjo

 

About the Author
Josh Turknett is founder and lead brain hacker at Brainjo Productions
 

View the Brainjo Course Catalog

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Episode 31: How to Cross the “Gap of Suck”

by Josh Turknett, MD

Here’s a fact of banjo that you should find reassuring: everybody sucks at first.

Nobody is born knowing how to play the banjo. Nor is the banjo-learning algorithm baked into our brain’s developmental program.

Nope. We must use our general purpose intelligence to build our banjo picking circuitry from scratch.

The wondrous thing about this is that it’s possible to do so at all. Such is the gift of a plastic, malleable, customizable brain.

This means, as any of you reading this series knows well by now, innate ability is not the thing that matters. Anyone is capable of building a musical brain.

But building it, and building it well, is where the challenge lies. It’s not those who are born with musical brains that become master musicians, it’s those who are good at building them.

And arguably the single greatest challenge, the primary obstacle that weeds out more aspiring banjoists than anything else, is the “Gap of Suck.”

Whether you make it across the Gap of Suck, or get lost in its vacuum forever, makes all the difference.

What is the “Gap of Suck?”

The “Gap of Suck,” described by Kathy Sierra in her book Badass, is that time in the development of any skill, from sports, to writing fiction, to acting, to woodworking, to drawing, to knitting, to playing a musical instrument of any kind, when you’re just no good. When you’re putting in effort in practicing, but have little to nothing to show for it (or, at least is seems that way).

The early stages in learning anything are mixed bag. On the one hand, it is the time of greatest growth – relatively speaking, there’s never another time in your journey where you’ll be learning more.

At the neuronal level, this early growth requires massive restructuring in the brain. And that restructuring takes time.

Meanwhile, while all that massive brain rewiring is happening, you still suck. In fact, you may have no awareness that any progress is happening at all.

From your perspective, you just aren’t any good, and you want real results faster than they’re coming.

And nobody enjoys this. It’s perhaps doubly hard in this information age of ours. In olden times, may have only come across one or two really great players in a lifetime.

Now we can watch scores of them at the touch of a screen.

Watching a masterful banjo player can (and should) serve as a source of inspiration, and fuel our desire to get better. But it can also remind us how far we’ve yet to go. Or, in other words, it can serve as a poignant, omnipresent reminder of just how much we suck.

For many, the Gap of Suck will pose the greatest existential threat to their life as a banjo player. So anything you can do to improve your odds of making it across it is crucial.

Fortunately, there’s a large body of knowledge on how you can do just that – knowledge acquired from both the study of experts and of the neurobiology of learning.

Here are 5 key strategies for making it across the Gap of Suck, all of which are common habits of the very top performers in multiple domains:

1. Break it down.

Break the learning process into the smallest possible bits you can practice. Time and again, this has been shown to be essential to learning anything successfully, the reasons for which we’ve covered in prior episodes of the Laws of Brainjo.

Beyond being the best way to build efficient and effective neural sub-circuits, there are also tremendous psychological advantages to breaking big goals into bite-sized bits:

In 1985, mountain climber Joe Simpson found himself found himself alone in the Peruvian Andes after having plummeted 150 feet into a deep crevasse. His climbing partner thought him dead. Between the injuries he’d sustained and the bitter cold, making the 5 mile trek back to base camp – a trek that included crossing a glacier – seemed implausible to any rational mind.

Yet, for the next three days, with frostbitten fingers and a broken leg, Simpson hobbled onwards. Realizing that focusing on how far he had left to go would only serve to reinforce the terrible odds he faced, he needed to break it down into goals that didn’t seem so insurmountable. So he took his one big goal – making it to base camp – and broke it down into a multitude of smaller goals that he tried to achieve in 20 minutes. Can I crawl to the next boulder in 20 minutes? Make it to that next bend? And so on.

“I started to look at things and think, ‘If I can get to that crevasse over there in 20 minutes, that’s what I’m going to do.’ … And it became obsessive. I don’t know why I did it. I think I knew the big picture of what was happening to me, and what I had to do was so big, I couldn’t deal with it.”

                                                                        – Joe Simpson, from “Touching the Void”

 

Struggling to remember how to play Foggy Mountain Breakdown in its entirety? Then just try to remember the first measure. Or two measures.

Not only is dividing and conquering the most effective approach to learning, but it’s also the one that comes with most rewards. The single greatest motivating factor is progress, and the more opportunities you create for demonstrating progress, the more likely you are to soldier on.

Who knows, it might even save your life one day.


RELATED: Breaking things down into the smallest learnable bits, AND learning those bits in the right sequence, is one of the primary foundations of the Brainjo Method. Watch the video below to learn more about how this is applied to learning the banjo (click here to learn more about the Brainjo course for fingerstyle banjo):


 

2. Embrace the struggle.

It’s natural to equate “struggle” with “pain,” and natural then to see your early struggles as painful. A bitter pill you must swallow. A necessary evil.

Another option is to reconfigure your thoughts about the struggle entirely.

Think for a moment all the things that you know how to do without giving them a second thought – walking, talking, using a fork, writing your name, and so on.

Do you revel in your ability to do these things, or do you think them ordinary? I imagine it’s the latter.

And why don’t you think anything of them? Because you didn’t have to work for them (or, more accurately, you no longer remember how you once did struggle to learn those things).

If you don’t have to expend much effort to get somewhere, then getting there isn’t nearly as gratifying. It’s the struggle to get there that gives our ultimate success its meaning.

The very best performers learn to look forward to the struggle. Struggle doesn’t equate to pain. Struggle equates to progress.

 

3. Set process-oriented goals.

Sure, you could set a goal like “I want to play Foggy Mountain Breakdown, the way Earl played it, at 120 bpm in 6 months.”

That seems reasonable enough. But there’s a problem with an outcome-oriented goal like that.

It depends on some factors that you can’t influence. There’s no way to predict whether certain goals are within the realm of feasibility.

Why would this be a problem? Because if you do everything right in your effort to achieve that goal but fall short, you’ll come away feeling discouraged.

On the other hand, the variable you can influence is your process. You can control whether or not you achieve a process-oriented goal, such as “I’m going to practice for 20 minutes every evening,” or “I’m going to make sure each sub-skill is automatic before moving on to the next one.” These factors do influence the final outcome, and whether you adhere to them is entirely within your control.

The top performers determine the process that’s most likely to lead to the outcome they desire, and then commit to following the process itself.

 

4. Don’t play the comparison game (unless it’s to yourself).

As mentioned, we live in unprecedented times, with the ability to watch scores of gifted banjoists at the click of a mouse. And it’s human nature to compare ourselves to others and see how we stack up.

Avoid that trap, because nothing good ever comes from it.

When you’re in the Gap of Suck, almost everyone is better than you. It’s just statistics. But, remember 2 things:

  1. Everyone had to cross the Gap of Suck.
  2. No matter how “good” you get, there will always be those you look up to.

If you get in the habit of playing the comparison game, then get used to a life of disappointment. Because no matter how good you become, you will never run short of players to compare yourself unfavorably to.

The flip side of these unprecedented times is it also means we have countless sources of inspiration. Those same players that you could use as a source of disappointment can instead be used as inspiration. They show you what’s possible if you stick with this banjo thing, if you make it across the Gap of Suck.

Remember, there is no good or bad, only where you are on the Timeline of Mastery. Those players who are further along give you a glimpse of your future.

 

5. Look backwards, not forwards.

We humans adapt quickly to the new status quo. All in all, it serves us well. But that means it can be easy to forget how far we’ve come.

As I mentioned earlier, there is not good or bad, only where you are on the Timeline. At any moment in time, there’s what’s ahead of you, and what’s behind you.

Combine our tendency to always look forwards towards where we’d like to be, rather than backwards at where we’ve come from, with how rapidly we adapt to any new normal, and it’s easy to convince ourselves that we’re not making progress.

Remember that every micro skill you’ve learned on the banjo, from picking the 1st string cleanly with your middle finger, to forming your first partial D chord, once felt really hard. And, regardless of where you are, there are almost certainly players who’d like to trade places with you. To them, you are their future.

When assessing progress, the proper metric is not how far you have left go (which is infinite), but how far you have come. 

Talk to almost any expert musician and they’ll tell you that there will always be more that you’d like to do, that this journey never ends, and that every position on the timeline of learning is relative. There is no finish line, only this moment in time, framed by where you’ve been, and where you’re going.


To learn more about the Breakthrough Banjo courses for clawhammer and fingerstyle banjo, click the relevant link below:

— Breakthrough Banjo for CLAWHAMMER Banjo —

— Breakthrough Banjo for FINGERSTYLE Banjo —


— The Laws of Brainjo Table of Contents —

About the Author
Josh Turknett is founder and lead brain hacker at Brainjo Productions
 

View the Brainjo Course Catalog

brainjo 1

 

Clawhammer Tune of the Week: “Last Chance”

Click on the button below to get the PDF download for this tab delivered to you, and get 2 new tunes and tabs sent to you every week!

Click Here To Get The Tab


Recently I posted about the wonders of alternate tunings, and presented what I consider to be 5 compelling reasons why banjoists should explore alternate tunings, hopefully putting to rest some commonly held misconceptions about them

(RELATED: click here to read “5 Reasons Why Banjo Players Should Use Alternate Tunings“).

Yet, there’s probably nothing more persuasive than just hearing – or better yet – playing in these tunings for yourself.

And, in my opinion, there’s perhaps no better song for demonstrating what makes these tunings so special than this week’s tune, “Last Chance.”

It is played out of fDFCD tuning, which is so indelibly associated with this tune that it’s often referred to as “Last Chance tuning” (again, if you feel any resistance towards playing in a new tuning like this, then click here to read the article to be dissuaded of such notions!).

It’s a tune most commonly associated with the incredible Hobart Smith, one of my personal musical heroes, and namesake for the “Hobart” model of the Brainjo banjo line (click to listen to Hobart’s recording).

As I mention in the article, many of these iconic tunes in alternate tunings have a high awesomeness to technical difficulty quotient – meaning, they’re relatively easy to play, yet generate incredible sounds from your banjo.

(RELATED: IMO, we should pay a lot more attention to tunes in this category, ones that give you the most bang for your playing buck, and I think they should form a significant chunk of early banjo instruction. Along those lines, click here to check out “The Magic of Old Time Banjo” book of tabs, a collection of 10 iconic tunes that fit this bill).

Additionally, below you’ll also find tabs and video tutorials for two arrangements of this tune, one for the version played in the video, and one for a Brainjo level 2 arrangement. These are excerpts from the new “Magic of Old Time Banjo” supplemental module in the Breakthrough Banjo course.


(NOTE: For those considering acquiring a Brainjo banjo, the banjo played in this video is – naturally – a “Hobart” model. Click here if you’d like to learn more, or claim one in the next batch.)


 Last Chance

fDFCD tuning, Brainjo level 3

Last Chance clawhammer banjo tab

Video Tutorial

(from the “Magic of Old Time Banjo” module)

 

Last Chance

fDFCD tuning, Brainjo level 2

Last Chance clawhammer banjo tab

Video Tutorial 

(from the “Magic of Old Time Banjo” module)

 

More tunes that showcase the Magic of Old Time Banjo

 

Notes on the Tab

Notes in parentheses are “skip” notes. To learn more about these, check out my video lesson on the subject.

For more on reading tabs in general, check out this complete guide to reading banjo tabs.

[RELATED: Level 2 arrangements and video demos for the Tune (and Song!) of the Week tunes are now available as part of the Breakthrough Banjo course. Learn more about it here.

Click here for a current list of all the clawhammer songs and tunes currently available inside of The Vault

 

Learn More About Breakthrough Banjo

 

About the Author
Josh Turknett is founder and lead brain hacker at Brainjo Productions
 

View the Brainjo Course Catalog

 

Clawhammer Song and Tab of the Week: “Let Me Fall”

Click on the button below to get the PDF download for this tab delivered to you, and get 2 new tunes and tabs sent to you every week!

Click Here To Get The Tab

Sometimes a song’s lyrics are open to interpretation.

Like great poetry, a carefully crafted turn of phrase can spark moments of reflective insight, often revealing more about the listener than it does its author.

Then there are songs like this one, which is about getting drunk and falling down.

And also the need for assistance in shoe tying when ones manual dexterity has been compromised by the neuro-inhibitory influence of ethanol.

 Let Me Fall

aEAC#E tuning, Brainjo level 3

Let me fall clawhammer banjo tab part 1

 

Let me fall clawhammer banjo tab part 2

Notes on the Tab

In this arrangement, I’ve tabbed out the part I play in the banjo “solo,” as well as the vocal backup I play on the banjo while singing.

Notes in parentheses are “skip” notes – to learn more about skips and syncopated skips, check out my video lesson on the subject.

For more on reading tabs in general, check out this complete guide to reading banjo tabs.

PRIOR SONG OF THE WEEK EPISODES

  • Episode 1: “Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow”
  • Episode 2: “Gumtree Canoe”
  • Episode 3: “Crawdad Hole”
  • Episode 4: “Oh Susanna”
  • Episode 5: “Freight Train”
  • Episode 6: “Grandfather’s Clock”
  • Episode 7: “Hop High Lulu”
  • Episode 8: “Been All Around This World”
  • Episode 9: “I’ll Fly Away”
  • Episode 10: “Leaving Home”
  • Episode 11: “Poor Orphan Child”
  • Episode 12: “Mr. Tambourine Man”
  • Episode 13: “Swanee River”
  • Episode 14: “Big Sciota”
  • Episode 15: “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms”
  • Episode 16: “Darling Corey”
  • Episode 17: “Battle Hymn of the Republic”
  • Episode 18: “America the Beautiful”
  • Episode 19: “Bury Me Beneath the Willow”
  • Episode 20: “Way Out There”
  • Episode 21: “New Slang”
  • Episode 22: “I Saw the Light”
  • Episode 23: “Amazing Grace”
  • Episode 24: “Blowin’ in the Wind”
  • Episode 25: “Yankee Doodle”
  • Episode 26: “Budapest”
  • Episode 27: “Wildwood Flower”
  • Episode 28: “Paradise”
  • Episode 29: “Mountain Dew”
  • Episode 30: “Blue Tail Fly”
  • Episode 31: “Otto Wood”
  • Episode 32: “Down on the Corner”
  • Episode 33: “City of New Orleans”
  • Episode 34: “Big Rock Candy Mountains”
  • Episode 35: “Come to the Bower”
  • Episode 36: “Old Kentucky Home”
  • Episode 37: “Long Journey Home”
  • Episode 38: “Dixie”
  • Episode 39: “Hard Times”
  • Episode 40: “Corrina Corrina”
  • Episode 41: “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain”
  • Episode 42: “Johnson Boys”
  • Episode 43: “Bad Moon Rising”
  • Episode 44: “Reuben’s Train”
  • Episode 45: “Let the Mermaid’s Flirt With Me”
  • Episode 46: “Rocky Top”
  • Episode 47: “Groundhog”
  • Episode 48: “Lazy John”
  • Episode 49: “The Gambler”
  • Episode 50: “8 More Miles To Louisville”
  • Episode 51: “Who’ll Stop the Rain”
  • Episode 52: “Pretty Polly”
  • Episode 53: “You Are My Sunshine”
  • Episode 54: “Old Molly Hare”
  • Episode 55: “The Miller’s Will”
  • Episode 56: “Walking Cane”
  • Episode 57: “Feast Here Tonight”

Level 2 arrangements and video demos for the Tune (and Song!) of the Week tunes are now available as part of the Breakthrough Banjo course.

Click here for a current list of all the clawhammer songs and tunes currently available inside of The Vault

Learn More About Breakthrough Banjo

 

About the Author
Josh Turknett is founder and lead brain hacker at Brainjo Productions
 

View the Brainjo Course Catalog

brainjo larger musical mind

Clawhammer Tune of the Week: “Five Miles from Town”

Click on the button below to get the PDF download for this tab delivered to you, and get 2 new tunes and tabs sent to you every week!

Click Here To Get The Tab


Last week, my Georgia Jays band mate (and award-winning whiskey maker) Justin Manglitz and I traveled to the shores of the Atlantic to wrap up the recording of our 2nd album, which will be out in early Fall (click here to check out our first release, including the “Banjo Player’s Edition”).

To celebrate, we played Clyde Davenport’s classic tune “5 Miles from Town,” a preview from our now underway 3rd release, and the latest installment in the Tune of the Week series.

This has always been a favorite tune of mine, one that seems to beg to be played for long stretches.

Since it’s a bit more difficult to pick out the individual notes of the banjo in this banjo-fiddle duet, below you’ll also find a solo banjo tutorial video for those of you trying to learn it.

(Note: these tutorial videos, which present the tune being played alongside the tab at moderate and slow speeds, are a new resource I’m adding inside the Vault – click here for a list of tunes currently inside the Vault).

 

 


(NOTE: For those considering acquiring a Brainjo banjo, the banjo played in this video is a “Hobart” model. Click here if you’d like to learn more, or claim one in the next batch.)


 Five Miles from Town

aDADE tuning, Brainjo level 3

5 Miles from Town clawhammer banjo tab part 1

5 Miles from Town clawhammer banjo tab part 2

Notes on the Tab

Notes in parentheses are “skip” notes. To learn more about these, check out my video lesson on the subject.

For more on reading tabs in general, check out this complete guide to reading banjo tabs.

[RELATED: Level 2 arrangements and video demos for the Tune (and Song!) of the Week tunes are now available as part of the Breakthrough Banjo course. Learn more about it here.

Click here for a current list of all the clawhammer songs and tunes currently available inside of The Vault

 

Learn More About Breakthrough Banjo

 

About the Author
Josh Turknett is founder and lead brain hacker at Brainjo Productions
 

View the Brainjo Course Catalog

 

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