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
