Pete Wernick - Posted - 01/29/2022:  13:07:06

I'm always surprised to hear banjo players resisting learning to play in D with no capo and the fifth tuned to A. It's a really potent format, so many great and playable possibilities and sounds that can't be played in any other "D" format (playing in C with capo 2, or D-tuning, or capoing 7). Changing keys without having to move the capo is a wonderful convenience for "staying in tune", and is very helpful for a band wanting to minimize tuning on stage.

I've written and recorded numerous instrumentals in D, including some by Hot Rize ("Frank's Blues", "Old Dan Tucker", "Angeline the Baker"...) . Two of our biggest hit songs, "Nellie Kane" and "Colleen Malone" are in E, and use the same format, only capoed 2 and with the 5th up 2 more frets, to B. The melodies are all in the first 4 frets!

If the song is in D or E, you have to *deal with it*, not just lay out and wait for one in G or A! I wrote a Banjo Newsletter column about it, with special reference to the fact that a lot of females find D and E good singing keys, and female lead singers have been an important force in bluegrass for a while now!

Another Banjo Newsletter column specifically recommends learning tabs of songs played in "D in G tuning" format, and names a bunch of Hot Rize songs that I play in that format. All of those breaks can be found in my Tab Archive.

For an hour-plus of video instruction showing in slow detail the many possibilities that D offers for improvising and creativity, as well as playing melody-based breaks in D, Volume 2 of my Make Up Your Own Banjo Solos video is a compact lesson in "all the possibilities", and there are lots!

In Hot Rize, we would always want the show to keep moving without a lot of capo changes, but not be stuck in one key. So being able to handle non-G keys while stay in G tuning came in handy. Say we wanted to do 4 particular songs in a row, but they were all in A.... Putting a song in E right in the middle of them meant no more than 2 in a row in A -- and no banjo capo changes for 5 consecutive songs. VERY handy, and no "waiting while the banjo player tunes"! (the scourge of amateurish live shows, and sadly, a trigger for banjo jokes!)

Last point: If any readers aspire to playing in a band with a great female singer like Rhonda Vincent or Brooke Aldrich, Laurie Lewis, etc. the D-in-G-tuning format is not just recommended but completely essential. Don't back down, step up! You'll see it's not physically hard, just something to learn and get used to.

Pete

Ira Gitlin - Posted - 01/29/2022:  15:48:58

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Originally posted by Pete Wernick

 

Last point: If any readers aspire to playing in a band with a great female singer like Rhonda Vincent or Brooke Aldrich, Laurie Lewis, etc. the D-in-G-tuning format is not just recommended but completely essential. Don't back down, step up! You'll see it's not physically hard, just something to learn and get used to.

Pete

 

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Yeah. I remember three decades ago watching a Laurie Lewis show and noticing that over the course of the entire evening Tony Furtado played MAYBE 3 or 4 songs out of G position.

overhere - Posted - 02/02/2022:  04:16:46

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Originally posted by KCJones

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Originally posted by doryman

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Originally posted by KCJones

doryman No, I mean gCGBD. That is standard tuning on a banjo.



Open G tuning is an alternative tuning that gained popularity in the mid-20th century, and is a common tuning used today, along with double-c and sawmill, but it's not standard tuning. 

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There was a time when pumping "regular gas" meant that you were filling your tank with leaded gasoline, but that's not what regular means anymore. 

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Complete non-sequitur. You're talking about material standards and fuel regulations, there's a reason those things change and they're not analogous to the common vernacular of a folk string instrument. 

Even today, open G is not a universal standard. I go to a jam where the only banjo tunings used are double-C (capo'd at 2) and Sawmill.

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****......

zinginstruments.com/how-to-tune-a-banjo/

Tom Meisenheimer - Posted - 02/03/2022:  10:47:00

Fella sez ''cause I don't like playing in the key of D".

That puzzles me. I consider D to be a better tuning than G. Try playing Dixie in G.
Mike Seeger once pondered the number of tunings for the banjo. I think he figured some where around 50. There was a guy had a web site in England (I think, or maybe New Zealand??) Anyway he went off the edge with a hundred or two hundred tunings.

Get to know your instrument. I only play in G, A, G & A modal minor, C, D, D modal minor, Last Chance, E (my minstrel replica and my 1870 fretless). Of course you can futz with a capo. Old(er) banjos don't have fifth string spikes but you can capo and retune the fifth string. The thing I am also puzzled by is that most of my fellow banjo players only play in 3 or 4 (at the most) tunings.

The banjo is a musical instrument. Treat it as such. There is almost no limit as to what you can play on the banjo. (See Bela Fleck).

In my later years (I'm old) I have given over to experimenting with the instrument known as the banjo, in its many iterations. Its a marvelous instrument and has a voice most of you have seldom heard and very likely never tried to bring out.

I rarely play with others. mostly because I'm in a relatively remote area with few musicians but also because they have a hard time with my playing habits.

So if you want a lifetime of playing like Wade Ward or ....? But if you want to REALLY learn your instrument....!

Ira Gitlin - Posted - 02/03/2022:  12:35:15

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Originally posted by Tom Meisenheimer

 Try playing Dixie in G.

 

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Yeah. It mainly depends on the range of the melody, relative to the root. A lot of songs from the bluegrass/old-time tradition have ranges from roughly the fifth scale degree below the root to roughly the fifth above the root (e.g., "I'll Fly Away", "Long Journey Home", and MANY more). Melodies like that fit beautifully into the first couple of frets when we're in G tuning--expecially when men are singing (i.e., in the G+capo keys).



But the lowest note of "Dixie" is the root, so it fits l in the low position in D tuning. (Similarly for "Dark Hollow", which has the same octave-plus-major-third/low-root range as "Dixie".)

Tom Meisenheimer - Posted - 02/03/2022:  15:34:42

I wish I knew more about the structure of music. The architecture as it were. Lately I have been concentrating on the "Irish" bouzouki. I have noticed a close similarity in the structure between tunes. Sometimes the groups of notes seem to fit a pattern but I'm not versed enough in music theory to give proper name to what I can innately recognize.

Now that I am along in years I really would benefit from being able to analyze what I play to identify the parts. Playing itself is not as important as it once was.

Half Barbaric Twanger - Posted - 02/04/2022:  11:53:53

If this has already been mentioned, I apologize, but here are the options my teacher taught me lo those many years ago, complete with a reference to Pete Seeger's "How to Play the 5-String Banjo".

On pages 21-22 and 42-43 Pete Seeger's "How to Play the 5-String Banjo" discusses two slightly different open D-tunings: (A)DF#AD and (F#)DF#AD. Seeger has chord charts in Appendix 3 on page 65, for (A)DF#AD, but you can use the same chords on both D- tunings, since the four long strings are tuned identically. I prefer the sound of (F#)DF#AD probably because the fifth string is an entire octave above the third string, similarly to the G-tuning (which was the first one I learned).