#banjo posting

[friend-dogor]

banjo week one notes 🪕

went from thinking "oh hell yeah maybe i will play a song for the kids at camp this year" to "oh my god i'd be lucky if i could learn Skip To My Lou on this thing i'm a complete idiot" to "oh okay maybe i could play a song for the kids at camp this year. a simple song though."

wrist pain unsurprising. what is surprising is the chest pain. this beast is Heavy and it keeps bonking into my chest and i don't have much padding there anymore. gonna end up with banjo boob bruises. sad. might sew myself a little padding/armor thing to cover just the right side of my chest, like a mune-ate in kyūdō or something.

humbling in a very nice way to start learning a new art pretty much entirely from scratch and on my own. the depths of my ignorance is astounding.

this thing is HEAVY. shockingly so. i went to put it on the scale and it came out at 6 pounds and i feel like i'm insane—but that's probably because all the weight is centered in the head/drum of the banjo. and the neck has barely any weight at all.

learning mostly from a combination of pete seeger's revised "How to Play a 5-String Banjo" manual he wrote back in the 50s, youtube videos, and tabs that people have shared online for free.

at the moment i just kind of read/view/play as much as i can until my head starts swimming and then i put it down (abt an hour of practice each day i think)

still struggling with the comfort factor on banjo picks. awkward to use. but i love that they look like i have claws LMFAO

the sound of the banjo itself is insanely pretty. it hums beautifully when its plucked or even gently prodded. when my brother handed it to me he hit a string and i was like Oh I Need That In My Hands Right Fucking Now

that said—because of the weight of it, part of me is now thinking, when i get a job that is stable and reliable, it might be nice to get a lightweight, open-back banjo without the resonator, maybe as a traveling/practice banjo. then, i looked at the prices for even used banjos and thought "fuck it maybe i'll learn to make one instead" LMFAOOOOO.

i'm already getting much quicker with plucking and fretting—fretting is still Dead Slow and i don't know where my fingers are, but it doesn't take me a whole minute to put fingers down (EMBARRASSINGLY SLOW) and plucking, i can even be a little fast and accurate sometimes. not up to Expected Plunky Banjo Speed but I'm getting there. would attach a video if i were not still embarrassed. next time maybe.

[kalisdaisyslastsimp]

I bet with tou that Jericho is only that good at the banjo bc his fingers are made of wood, because after practicing for 4 hours my fingers are absolutely wrecked, this cannot be healthy.

[ghoulsey]

bro are you fucking kidding me

[friend-dogor]

banjo week two notes 🪕

GETTING FASTER ! getting sloppier also, so it needs refining, but im building up the muscle memory finally

had a conversation with my dad where he told me somebody'd told him about a study that showed most people learned instruments best when they spend a little bit of time hard focusing on something and a lotta bitta time just kind of fiddling around while not Really focusing. like, strumming the chords while watching tv or something. this is great news for me because i don't have it in me to have my nose to the banjo shaped grindstone all the time

still avoiding tuning my banjo out of open G and into C—so i'm playing petes songs for C in open G and just translating the chords.

went on a very brief 24 hour trip out of state and even kinda missed my banjo a little bit...... 🥺 made me all the more excited to play it when i got back.

on sunday i passed it to my dad and my brother and they are both so much more musically skilled than me that i felt like a Thrill of Competency that i could tell my dad where to find the basic chords on the banjo. already, i have some minuscule amount of expertise on this instrument.....

that said once they found out the chords they could jam on it and produce lovely music, while im still sounding plunky and cautious. I'LL GET THERE!!!!!!!!!!! lovely to see and hear other people play the banjo though.

i'm less concerned about the weight/feel of the banjo now. it bothers me a little less/havent had any chest pain using it this week. maybe just getting used to it?

CAN KINDA PLAY SKIP TO MY LOU ON THIS THING ALREADY....not Well and not Fast and not Fancy but i think it's recognizable.

have googled "how long does it take to learn banjo" several times and keep getting many beautiful wise banjo websites telling me not to compare myself to others and that its all about the journey not the destination. and this is so true but i also want to make sure im not fucking it up so a little self comparison is not unhealthy i think. so i asked my dad how long it took him to learn guitar and he said "how would you define 'having learned guitar'" and so i said "when you felt you knew at least a single song well enough that you'd be confident performing it in front of somebody else" and he said "about six months, maybe a year." and so using my dad's experience learning guitar as a highschool freshman, also self taught, i think i am doing okay.

he said he learned to play from a neil young booklet, and that he played a single song in there for those six months, and my grandma, sick of hearing it, got to calling it "that old song again" LMFAO. would be funny to learn whatever song that is.

tried to find a little more banjo to listen to on my regular music app just to hear it a little more, and for understandable reasons most of what turned up was bluegrass, but i dont think im deep into banjos enough to really get bluegrass, it feels like the genre which most wants to showcase complicated and fascinating picking styles, a little like metal is for guitars, and i still need thing that are pared down a bit that i can follow by ear.

plus, for better or for worse im a folkhead at heart

anyway here's some snippets from How to Play The 5 String Banjo that i was amused by

[friend-dogor]

banjo week three notes 🪕

I feel like I've hit my first plateau, where suddenly i'm like "okay i got one step down, where the hell do i go next?" and relatively quickly i found a different song to focus on, but! ough. forgot how much a part of learning that is. sucks!

newly aware of how bad my singing voice is LMFAO. its okay it doesnt have to be perfect, it doesn't even really have to be good, just close enough to carry the vocal melody while i play my banjo. but i will work on getting better anyway. luckily summer job includes a lot of singing songs so im gonna get some practice

getting faster with putting chords down!!!! cant do them without looking but it only takes me a couple seconds to switch into them

past few days i have had NO TIME to banjo am quickly running thru what i have memorized to get a little banjoing before work. miss my banjoooooo take me back to my banjooooo

[tooth-and-clawhammer]

IDK if I'm having impostor syndrome or what, but I'm feeling like I want to learn to actually play the banjo. Sure I can make the right sounds from the right motions, but I'm useless at a jam and have no real sense for actual, traditional banjo music. I get hired by non-trad/bluegrass/etc spaces to play my banjo as a novelty but for saying that I play for four years I have really no standing in real knowledgeable settings. I feel like I gotta restart from the ground up. Also feels very weird to have this like. $2k banjo in my possession and not really know what to do with it tbh.

[skinnedkaiju]

The harp is just heavens banjo

[meowlol75]

I think I’ll pick up stalking as my new hobby!