How easy is it playing the banjo compared to guitar

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As well as guitar, I also play mandolin and 5 string banjo, and, from guitarists, these often inspire a question along the lines of….how easy / hard is it to play the banjo / mandolin compared to the guitar. This isn’t actually that easy to answer as there are a couple of different things involved, but the bottom line is that if you can play the guitar a bit, then the finger movements needed to play banjo or mandolin shouldn’t be too difficult. What might be more tricky is to try not to play them like a guitar.

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The Amazing Slow Downer

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There are a lot of good resources out there on the web just now which make the job of learning a new song or technique a lot easier than in days gone by where you would have the song on a cassette (remember those) and rewind a 5 second section over and over or keep dropping the needle onto a section of a record trying to decode what was being played.

This is a preview of The Amazing Slow Downer. Read the full post (270 words, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

Favourite Mandolin Sites

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As it says on the tin…..my favourite sites either dedicated to or featuring a lot f content about mandolin playing and technique.  I think anyone interested in the mandolin will enjoy these sites.  The internet is a big place, so please let me know of ay other great sites out there that I may have missed:

Nigel Gatherer – www.nigelgatherer/mando.html

This is a preview of Favourite Mandolin Sites. Read the full post (565 words, estimated 2:16 mins reading time)

Favourite banjo websites

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A good couple of years ago, I blogged about a couple of banjo websites that I’d found really useful and entertaining. The plan at the time was to do an overview of the music sites that I’ve found most useful, and heres the first one. These are my favourite sites, and theres no criteria apart from I like them, but please let me know if i’ve left anything out. So in absoutely no particular order, here are my favourite banjo websites:

This is a preview of Favourite banjo websites. Read the full post (650 words, estimated 2:36 mins reading time)
Covers of records that contain some great songs to learn for guitar beginners

Songs (part 1)

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So heres the tricky bit about taking up the guitar, or any instrument, particularly when you’ve been out of the loop of learning for a while.  You know what you want to play, because you listen to music, which is why you want to play in the first place, but there’s not an obvious path as to how to get there.  So, to that end, I’ve written put a list of songs that I’ve used a lot in lessons and classes and that either demonstrate a technical or musical point that can then be applied to other pieces.  Some of these are (relatively!) easy guitar songs for beginners, some a little more advanced.  A big advantage of using songs rather than exercises is building a repertoire, as the more stuff you know, the quicker it is to learn new things.

This is a preview of Songs (part 1). Read the full post (1057 words, estimated 4:14 mins reading time)

Christmas Songs

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Having just been asked to transcribe a Christmas song I previously didnt know existed (Christmas Time by the Darkness), I was having a cup of coffee thinking about these songs. Most of the usual suspects had ceased to classed as music after many years of being shoved down our ears in supermarkets and shopping centres….so where are all the new Christmas songs? Well, I think there are a lot of them, but its very difficult for new songs to break through without advetising budgets equal to the size of a small countries economy.
Anyway, to redress to balance here’s one from the Porch Song Anthology:

This is a preview of Christmas Songs. Read the full post (132 words, estimated 32 secs reading time)

Introduction to Ragtime Guitar

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Download Ragtime Guitar Primer PDF


Ragtime music probably had its peak between the late 19th century and the end of the 1st world war, where it was overtaken in popularity by jazz.  Its a modified version of a march with a characteristic heavily syncopated rhythms.  A closely related style, the cakewalk, preceded ragtime, both being primarily written traditions in that the music was handed from musician to musician by written music, rather than by performance.  The most famous ragtime piece is probably the Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin, although a lot of the music played by blues players such as Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller and Elizabeth Cotton could also be described as ragtime guitar.  Although this can be a tricky style to categorise there is chord progressions and patterns that crop up in several different tunes.  The video and tab below show a basic style of ragtime playing based loosely on Blind Blake’s Southern Rag.

This is a preview of Introduction to Ragtime Guitar. Read the full post (160 words, estimated 38 secs reading time)