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Clawhammer Tune and Tab of the Week: “The Ballad of Jed Clampett”

April 17, 2015 by Josh 26 Comments

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.
 

The number of tunes that the average US citizen recognizes on the banjo can be counted on one hand.

And chances are, if you find yourself playing your 5 string in public and a random passerby musters the courage to make a request, chances are it’ll be one of those tunes.

Said passerby won’t care that all of those tunes were originally played 3-finger style and not clawhammer, nor will they likely be interested in you enlightening them as to the stylistic differences between the two. You, sir, have a banjo in your hands, and are expected to know banjo songs.

The Ballad of Jed Clampett, a.k.a the theme song to the Beverly Hillbillies TV show, is one of those songs (for those unfamiliar with it, The Beverly Hillbillies was a TV show that aired on American TV from 1962-1971. It was about a poor mountain family who strike it rich by finding oil on their property, and naturally end up moving to Beverly Hills, California to be amongst fell rich folk. Clashing of cultures and hilarity ensues.).

So for this week’s tune, I’ve taken this popular Scruggs classic and adapted it for clawhammer banjo.

Love em or hate em, these iconic banjo songs are virtually guaranteed to bring smiles to people’s faces. So if evoking smiles is something you enjoy, I think it’s worth knowing em.

The Ballad of Jed Clampett

gDGBD tuning, Brainjo level 3-4

Screen Shot 2015-04-17 at 5.39.31 PM

Notes on the tab

Skip Notes: The notes denoted as a shaded box are “skip” notes, meaning they’re not actually sounded by the picking finger. Instead, you continue the clawhammer motion with your picking hand, but “skip” playing the note by not striking it (this is a technique used to add space and syncopation). The fret number you see in the shaded box is the suggested note to play should you elect to strike the string.

Addendum

By request, here’s the bluegrassy tag lick I play at the end:

Screenshot 2015-04-21 14.20.45

 

Back to the Tune of the Week Playlist

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

Filed Under: free banjo tabs, tune of the week

Clawhammer Tune and Tab of the Week: “Rock the Cradle, Joe”

April 10, 2015 by Josh 30 Comments

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.


I like to sing. In fact, one of the reasons I first decided to dabble in clawhammer banjo years ago was because I thought it was so well suited for vocal accompaniment.

Little did I know at the time of the rabbit hole I was about to fall into.

And one of the great joys of the gourd banjo, which sounds its best tuned about half an octave or so lower than it’s modern, steel strung counterparts, is that it allows me to take tunes that aren’t well suited to my post-pubescent vocal register in their typical key and render them singable again.

Rock the Cradle, Joe has always been one of my favorite tunes to play. But being able to sing along just takes the joy up even one more notch. Thank you, gourd banjo.

Rock the Cradle, Joe

aDADE tuning, Brainjo level 3-4

 

Screen Shot 2015-04-10 at 6.34.49 PM

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

Filed Under: banjo lessons, free banjo tabs, tune of the week

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

April 3, 2015 by Josh 10 Comments

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.


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

Cumberland Gap clawhammer banjo tab

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

Filed Under: banjo lessons, free banjo tabs

Clawhammer Tune and Tab of the Week: Sugar Hill

March 27, 2015 by Josh 11 Comments

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

 Sugar Hill banjo tab

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

Filed Under: banjo lessons, free banjo tabs, tune of the week

Clawhammer Tune and Tab of the Week: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”

March 7, 2015 by Josh 30 Comments

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.

 

We music lovers owe Thomas Edison a huge debt of gratitude. With his invention of the wax cylinder phonograph in 1877, he set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately culminate in the world we find ourselves in today. A world in which we have access to more music than we could listen to in a lifetime, through a device that fits into our pocket, no less. An embarrassment of riches.

We take the magic of recorded music for granted these days, but just imagine what it must have been like when this technology first burst on the scene. For the first time ever in the history of humankind, it was possible to take an audio snapshot of a moment in time. You could play your favorite music on demand, whenever you wanted.

And it all started with Edison’s phonographic cylinder.

Recently, Benjamin Canaday, a leading expert on the Edison phonograph and founder of Canaphonic Records, contacted me about helping him with a project. Benjamin, who is clearly carrying on Edison’s inventive spirit, has developed a process both for restoring wax cylinders back to their original condition and for using digital audio files to produce new cylinder recordings. Amazing and inspiring stuff.

And the project he wanted help with? To create new banjo recordings to transfer to original, restored wax cylinders.

It took me all of negative 8 seconds to say yes.

For the first tune in this series we chose “Johnny Comes Marching Home”, a Civil War era song popular around the time of those phonographs. It’s a melody that still remains popular today, having been re-packaged into the children’s song “The Ants Go Marching”.

I thought it’d be neat to demonstrate the difference in sound between the modern digital recording and the original wax cylinder recording medium. So you’ll note the transition from one to other mid-way through the video (here’s a link to the full recording on just the wax cylinder).

More wax cylinder banjo recordings are on the way. You can follow along as they come out on Benjamin’s youtube channel. And, if you should find yourself fortunate enough to own an original Edison phonographic cylinder, you can purchase your very own copy of this tune on ebay!

 

 When Johnny Comes Marching Home

gDGBD tuning, Brainjo level 3

Screen Shot 2015-03-06 at 6.46.35 PM

Screen Shot 2015-03-06 at 6.46.45 PM

Notes on the tab

Skip Notes: The notes denoted as a shaded box are “skip” notes, meaning they’re not actually sounded by the picking finger. Instead, you continue the clawhammer motion with your picking hand, but “skip” playing the note by not striking it (this is a technique used to add space and syncopation). The fret number you see in the shaded box is the suggested note to play should you elect to strike the string.

Also, listen to the recording to here how I’ve adapted the original rhythm (played in the intro) to work as a 4/4 clawhammer piece.

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

Filed Under: free banjo tabs, tune of the week

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