Chapter 13

Ten Tips to Make Practicing More Fun

In This Chapter

Making the most of your practice time

Discovering practical tips to make you a better player

Practice. Ugh. For many people, just the word itself conjures up bad memories of traumatic mandatory childhood music lessons. You already know by now that if you’re going to make progress on the banjo, you have to practice just about every day if you can, but I don’t want you to view this as a chore. Practice should be something that you look forward to every time you pick up the instrument. You gotta do it, so try to find ways to make it as fun as possible.

In this chapter, you find practical and useful tips you can use right now that will keep you coming back time and time again . . . to practice!

Listen Actively

Actively listening to your favorite banjo music on CD or to other musicians at concerts and jam sessions makes you a better player. Before you even start to work on a new song, find a recorded version of it first and try to pick up the song by ear. As you listen to great playing, you’re internalizing what the banjo is supposed to sound like, the finer details of the style you’re learning, and how the instrument fits in a group setting. Active listening also helps you to remember a song’s chord progression and gives you ideas on how to accompany others when you aren’t taking a solo.

Keep in mind that there’s a time and a place for active listening. To keep the peace at home, carve out time when you can listen alone or in a way that doesn’t disturb others (here’s where headphones can come in handy). If you feel compelled every once in a while to expose your friends to your favorite banjo music, be aware that they may not want to listen to “Whoa Mule” 20 or 30 times in a row (I’m not sure why however. . . ).

Set Goals

Setting short-, medium-, and long-range goals keeps your practice routine on the right track and helps you to assess your overall progress. Your goals are unique to you. If you’ve never played a stringed instrument before, your first goal may be to successfully play a few simple songs for your friends. A little farther out in time, you may aspire to hold your own in a beginners’ jam session. If you’re feeling even more ambitious, someday you may want to play in a local amateur band or organize your family to make music together.

Your long-range goals (where you want to be one to three years out in time) determine your medium-range goals (6 to 12 months out in time). These medium-range goals help you to focus on what you should be practicing in the next one to two weeks (your short-term goals). Adjusting your goals every once in a while is fine. They’re there to inspire you to keep scaling to ever-greater banjo-playing heights, not to take all the fun out of playing.

If you’re taking lessons, work with your teacher to create a set of realistic, achievable goals that you can put in writing. You can even do this on your own. After you write down your goals, check back every month or two to see whether you’re still on track.

Practice Regularly

Regular daily practice, even if each session is for a short amount of time, leads to quicker progress than cramming in long sessions on your days off from work. When my daughter Corey was learning to play piano a few years ago, she came up with an interesting practice regimen: She would play for five or ten minutes three or four times almost every day, approaching the piano to play whenever the urge struck her. Similarly, when he’s at home, banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck also practices several times a day in short intervals.

If you can play for a little while almost every day and find one or two days a week where you can stretch out and play for a couple of hours at a time, all the better. Keep in mind that the more skilled you are as a player, the more practice time you need to advance to the next level.

Take the banjo out of its case and keep it on an instrument stand in your practice area (but out of the way of dogs, cats, and young children who may inadvertently tip it over). Then, when you’re ready to spend a few minutes playing, your instrument is right there waiting for you.

Warm Up

Athletes warm up with stretching routines, and you can do the same in your practice sessions. Warming up is a very important part of your overall practice as it prepares you mentally and physically for what comes next. When you warm up, work on aspects of your playing that you don’t have time to think about after you start playing faster.

For instance, you can devise warm-up exercises to isolate and work on specific right-hand picking patterns or left-hand techniques apart from songs. Your warm up is also the time for you to focus on your tone, your rhythm, and the clarity of your left-hand fretted notes, making adjustments when necessary. Try playing a few of your favorite songs, listening carefully to the clarity and fullness of each note and checking your overall technique as you play. Chapters 4 and 5 cover the fundamentals of banjo technique and contain excellent exercises for your warm up.

Although some players may need to warm up for only a few minutes before they’re ready to move on (which is the case with some experienced players), you may want to stay in this warm-up mode for up to 30 minutes or more before moving on to work on specific tunes. That’s fine! Practicing “within your zone” is better than wasting time playing things that are too difficult for you.

Use Tablature Sparingly

Although tablature (written music) is a wonderful resource that allows quick access to hundreds of tunes and also allows you to study closely the subtleties of a master player, use it in small doses. Tablature is great for showing you the left and right mechanics of how something is done, but don’t confuse the ability to read and play tab with really being able to play banjo. Try to internalize the sound of what you’re playing as quickly as possible so that you’re concentrating on what you’re hearing, rather than what your eyes are following on the tab page. (For more tips on how to read tab, see Chapter 3.)

Using tab in a jam session can be a significant breach of custom. You can begin to break the tab habit now by working on your accompaniment skills and playing with other musicians at your level as much as possible. Think of tablature as a road map, not a destination! (For more ideas on accompanying others, see Chapter 4.)

Get the Right Hand First

For adult learners, one of the most difficult aspects of banjo playing is putting the right- and left-hand techniques together and using both hands at the same time to play smoothly without interrupting the even flow of notes. If you’re also experiencing this problem, try playing the right-hand part by itself on the banjo’s open strings. After you have the rhythm and the mechanics of the right hand down, begin to add the left-hand techniques, bit by bit if necessary. Using this building-block approach may feel a bit mechanical at first, but it can cut your learning time in half. Plus, this method is a good way to check whether you’re playing something correctly.

Your right-hand technique communicates a lot about you as a player — your tone, your rhythm and drive, your volume, and even your mood! When playing with others, staying in rhythm is much more important than getting every note fretted correctly. Great players spend a lot of time working on right-hand technique. If you do the same, you’ll be a great player some day too!

You can get the basics of right- and left-hand techniques in Chapter 4; for more in-depth coverage, check out Chapters 5, 6, and 8 for bluegrass banjo and Chapters 5 and 6 for clawhammer banjo.

Gradually Increase Your Speed

Playing slowly until you master a technique or song is a tough guideline for banjo players to remember, because they all want to play as fast as they can as soon as possible. However, if the song doesn’t sound right when played slowly, the tune isn’t going to get any better when played fast (trust me on this one!). After you’re warmed up, use your practice time more efficiently (and enjoy it more in the process) by practicing at a slow enough speed where you’re still in control of what you’re playing. Keep in mind that this tempo could be different for each piece you’re working on.

After you’re comfortable playing at a slower pace, you may decide that you want to crank the speed up a notch. Regular practice with a metronome can help you to play faster. First, find a tempo where you’re playing a song well and get comfortable playing along without getting out of sync. Now try increasing the tempo on the metronome to the next highest setting and start playing again. The increase in speed is sometimes so gradual that you may not notice a difference in the tempo at first. However, sooner or later you’ll hit a bump in the road where you find one or two parts of a tune that give you problems. Work on just those sections at the new tempo, and after you’ve mastered them, start playing the entire tune again. You’ll soon be playing effectively at a faster tempo. (See Chapter 10 for more on metronomes.)

Be patient with your progress in this area — speed is a function of time spent with your instrument and is measured over months or even years. Especially if you’re an older player or if you’ve never played a fretted instrument before, speed may be the last element that falls into place as you’re learning to play. Banjo music is virtuosic stuff — think of it in the same way as you would approach a piece by J. S. Bach or Charlie Parker if you were an organist or a sax player. You wouldn’t expect to pick up that kind of music overnight would you? Just keep playing as much and as often as you can, and you will reach your goals.

Take Songs One Measure at a Time

Tablature enables you to play a song from beginning to end without really knowing what you’re playing. However, when you go to actually internalize something that you just played from tab, you need to work on memorizing each note and phrase and be able to move comfortably from one part to the next without stopping. The best way to do this is to start at the beginning (hey, what a concept!) and play the first measure or two over and over until you’ve got it without looking at the tab. If you’re learning by ear, you want to be able to play these measures by hearing them first in your head.

Listen to the sound of several measures played together and try to identify the musical phrases of your song (think of a musical phrase like you would a line of verse from a lyric — a phrase is a complete musical thought that usually consists of a couple of measures of music). After you’ve mastered the first phrase, move on to the second phrase. After you’ve got the second phrase down, spend a few moments playing the first and second phrases together, remembering not to rely on the tablature. Keep building out in this fashion to the end of the song, remembering to work each new phrase into the entire tune as you go along.

You’ll likely encounter some repetition along the way, so after you have the first section of a tune down pat, the second section usually takes less time. (See Chapter 3 for an introduction to the anatomy of a song.)

Play the Right Repertoire

If your goal is to play music with others, work on the tunes that they like to play. Luckily, almost all bluegrass and old-time musicians learn a basic shared set of tunes at one time or another. The musicians at your local jam session may also play a few personal favorites, including some tunes that may be unique to your part of the country. Keep in mind that more advanced players share a different set of tunes than beginning-level players, bluegrassers have a different repertoire than old-timers, and younger musicians may play some different tunes than the older folks play.

In Chapter 6, you can play four tunes that are jam standards, using both bluegrass and clawhammer techniques. These examples give you a good place to start in terms of building up your repertoire. After you’ve mastered a few basic pieces and you feel you’re ready to try a beginner’s jam session, find out what tunes these musicians like to play. Attend the session and make a list of the songs you hear or (with the permission of the other musicians) bring a tape recorder along to record the pieces you don’t know, so that you can work on them at home.

The Internet can also be of assistance as you search for tunes. Banjo player Pete Wernick has lists of bluegrass jam session favorites at www.drbanjo.com. You can also find several archives of old-time music; visit the homepage of the Friends of Old Time Banjo (www.oldtimebanjo.com) for links to the Digital Library of Appalachia at Berea College and other archival resources.

Keep Track of Your Progress

Most players keep a tune list in the front pocket of their music notebook. You can group tunes in any way you like. Some players group by key or tempo, while others create a list of tunes they already know, a list of tunes they’re working on right now, and another list of tunes they want to learn in the near future. A tune list comes in handy when you’re comparing what you know with another musician, but you suddenly can’t recall a thing about any of the tunes you know (believe me, it happens, even with professional players).

If you’re working hard at building up speed with the metronome, write the tempo settings down in pencil for each tune you’re working on so that you know at what tempo to start at your next practice session. You may also want to maintain a practice diary where you can keep some brief notes about some of the things you worked on that day and also remind yourself about what needs more work the next time your pick up the banjo, which will be either just after you put down this book today or tomorrow at the latest, right?