Blog – Page 59

Clawhammer Tune and Tab of the Week: “Cumberland Gap”

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We’ve got it made today. We can plop down in our motorized vehicles, type in our final coordinates into our navigation device of choice, sit back, and mindlessly move from one coast to the other with barely any effort.

But long before there was Route 66 or Highway 1, long before there were even Europeans in North America, there was the Cumberland Gap.

As easy as it is to take our ease of travel for granted, it certainly wasn’t always this way. For hundreds of thousand of years, traveling long distances for humans was HARD work. Especially if it involved mountain ranges.

Anything that made traversing those ranges easier, like a long passable stretch of land between the ridges, was cause for celebration. And maybe a song or three.

So this week’s tune, Cumberland Gap, is one of those tunes that has multiple versions floating around. Some have two parts, some three. Some are in D, some are in G. There are even specialized banjo “Cumberland Gap” tunings just for playing this tune. And, of course, even these can vary from one place to another!

All this variety is probably testament to the importance of this gateway to the west in Appalachian history. Personally, I’ve always been partial to the three part version of this tune in the key of D. So, naturally, that’s the one I’ve chosen to present here.

Cumberland Gap

aDADE tuning, Brainjo level 3-4

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

Down to the Last Drop

We started with 40 tunes, narrowed it down to 12, and now we’re down to 1.

All the votes are in and tallied, and it’s time to crown our first winner. First, a huge thanks to all of you have you voted, either with a thumbs up on YouTube or by email. This was really tons of fun for me, and you made it so.

As I said in last week’s email, one of the coolest things about this voting exercise was seeing the amazing variety of preferences amongst everyone. Every tune seems to have its die hard fans. Every tune is a winner in my book! 😉

That said, there was one winner that clearly emerged from the pack. And had you asked me in advance to predict which tune would win, this is the one I would have chosen. So, without further ado, I present to you….

As ambassadors for the banjo go, I don’t think you can do much better than Snowdrop. In a matter of 4-7 notes (depending on whose data you use), you can single-handedly wipe out virtually every preconceived notion and misconception someone may have about banjos and the people that play them.

So, if you haven’t learned it yet, get crackin’! (And click here for my Snowdrop tutorial from the Clawhammer Core Repertoire Series).

Thanks again for your support of the tune of the week. Once we’ve got another good batch of tunes behind us, I think I’ll open up another round of voting.

Just for fun, here’s how the entire top 12 fared (in terms of percentage of total votes received amongst all 40 tunes):

4.9%

4.6%

4.5%

4.3%

4.2%

2.9%

2.8%

2.6%

Clawhammer Tune and Tab of the Week: Sugar Hill

Click here to subscribe to the tune of the week (if you’re not already a subscriber) and get a new tune every Friday, plus tabs to all the ones to date.

If you wanna get your eye knocked out,

If you wanna get your fill,

If you wanna get your eye knocked out,

Climb on Sugar Hill.

Come on, where else can you get lyrics like these.

Yet, even without uncommonly strong lyrics such as these, Sugar Hill’s melody alone would make it an outstanding tune. It may be obvious to some that I have a special place in my heart from the Round Peak repertoire, and Sugar Hill is no exception.

I thought this was another tune well suited to the gourd, so that’s what you have here. I’m tuned down to here, but Sugar Hill is most commonly played as a D tune, in aDADE tuning on the banjo (as indicated in the tab). I’ve included quite a few syncopations in this one, and utilized a number of “skip” notes to do so (the notes in the shaded boxes). I’ve received a lot of questions about these since launching this series, and will be releasing a video soon on the various ways I use them.

The video is part of the Breakthrough Banjo course contents (part of the month on Syncopation), but the technique has been such a popular subject that I thought I’d make this video available to all the Tune of the Week subscribers. So stay on the lookout for it.

Sugar Hill

aDADE tuning, Brainjo level 3-4

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

Clawhammer Core Repertoire Series: “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine”

Season 2: Solo Clawhammer Classics

Episode 3: “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine”

Sign up here to get a downloadable PDF of Episodes 1-15 of the Clawhammer Core Repertoire Series. You’ll also be notified whenever a new episode comes out.

Thinking back through all of the tunes that I enjoy playing as solo numbers, the tune up for this installment in the “Solo Clawhammer Classics” series may be the one that’s been in my repertoire the longest. It’s one of those tunes that grabbed me on the first listen, and that, all these years later, I’ve yet to tire of playing.

And it’s one of those tunes that seems to compel even the most lackadaisical fan of the five string (i.e. – your spouse) to begrudgingly admit to enjoying.

Technically speaking, this one’s a fiddle tune, and so is on the notier side. That being said, the fingering lays out so well in double D tuning that it seems as if it were fated to be a banjo tune. In other words, it’s not as technically difficult as it may sound. And, even when it’s played simply, it’s beautiful.

So let’s get to it.

Step 1: Know thy Melody

To help imprint this tune into your noodle, take a listen to the video above a few times. And, to hear it played on the fiddle, here are a couple tracks courtesy of the sawstrokers down at their fiddling hangout:

Fiddle 1

Fiddle 2

As an added bonus, check out Norman Blake’s version of this tune on guitar – it’s one of my all-time favorite guitar solos, and a perfect setting of this gorgeous tune.

Step 2: Find the Melody Notes

Next up, it’s time to search our fretboard for our melodic suspects. Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine is typically played as a D tune, and as I said above, lays out perfectly in double D tuning. So get tuned up to aDADE, and let’s find some notes!

Here’s what I hear as the basic melody of this tune:

See if you can pick that out on your own 5-string. When you think you’ve got it, check the answer tab below:

Step 3 – Add Some Clawhammery Stuff

Now we’ll take that basic melody, add in a few simple left hand ornamentations along with some ditty strums after our core melody notes, and we turn it into something that looks like this:

And it sounds like this:

Step 4: Embellish to Taste

With this as our basic foundation, we can continue to refine it as we see fit, or leave it as is, as it really doesn’t need much dressing up to sound great.

For my slightly refined version, which you can hear in the video above, I’ve added in a few more melody notes and added in a bit more syncopations (where you see the “skip notes”) to suit my tastes.

My final arrangement looks like this:

Go to the Core Repertoire Series Table of Contents

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

Clawhammer Banjo Tune of the Week: “Nancy”

Click here to subscribe to the tune of the week (if you’re not already a subscriber) and get a new tune every Friday, plus tabs to all the ones to date.

In last Friday’s tune of the week, I took a tune – “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” – that’s traditionally played in 6:8 time and transformed it into 4:4 time signature, a rhythm better suited to the clawhammer stroke. There’s a long precedent for this sort of thing in old-time music, of taking old melodies and making them swing a bit more.

To me this is one of the defining features of southern old-time music – the infusion of rhythmic force into delicate, ornamental melodies. A transformation made to maximize the foot stompage quotient.

For kicks, in this week’s tune of the week I took the opposite tack by taking a tune typically played in 4:4 time and transforming it to 6:8 – for the intro, at least. I enjoy doing this sort of thing, taking a tune I know well and shifting it in some way: slowing it down, changing the time signature, etc. It’s like getting a free tune for half the effort!

And the tune in question is “Nancy”, one reported to have been originally composed by Northumbrian small piper Tom Clough in the 1930s. It’s a close cousin, or perhaps even a sibling, to the tunes “Fair Morning Hornpipe” and “Morpeth Rant”, and how that all came to pass I do not know. Sounds like an ideal research project for the aspiring musicology major, but beyond the scope of our discussion here.

For our purposes, we’ll just add it under the all encompassing “folk process” umbrella.

For years now, and for reasons my conscious mind likely isn’t privy to, this has been the tune that often falls out first when I grab my banjo. The tune I start playing before I’ve realized I’ve started playing. I think a lot of folks have a tune or tunes like this.

So consider that a warning. This tune can be habit forming.

Nancy

aDADE tuning, Brainjo level 4

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