Alvin Conder - Posted - 02/25/2023:  05:31:12

Been playing since I was a child. Have not been a child in near 1/2 century. Started clawhammer in seriousness after Scruggs Style as a young teenager. Have I ever gotten bored with the music, or found playing boring? After really thinking about this question, I can say no.

At times past I became frustrated with what I was trying to accomplish, but that became a challenge and I worked through it.

Years ago, when I played in a professional group and that forced me to be versed in different styles of banjo and to also be well versed in guitar. It was a ton of work to get up to the playing level of my band mates who were well seasoned musicians. But once I got there, the feeling of playing with a very tight knit group of musicians was one of a kind. That experience has kept me going for the past decades.

I haven’t played professionally in decades, I can’t stand ( or handle) large jams or festivals, but I absolutely love and live for small organized playing sessions with very high caliber players. Unfortunately, I only get to do that a few times a year, but knowing that I have those sessions in my future keep me practicing daily and working towards being the absolute best musician that I can potentially be.

At this point, I have been sitting behind a banjo or a guitar playing what is now called traditional music since the early 1970’s. The banjo has taken me to places I never would of ever thought to travel to. I have met people and made friends that I have kept for a lifetime through the banjo. Heck, I even met my Wife if 40 years through musician friends. My best man at that wedding was a world class musician who I first met when I was 13 when I walking down a street in NYC with a banjo case in hand and he asked “What the heck are you doing with that?”. The banjo I was walking down the street with I got directly from the hands of my best friend who gave me his family banjo after he saw how taken I was with the music he was playing which he was learning from his Mother. It’s in my own history and in my soul.

Saying that I have become bored with music would be like saying I have become bored with life.

writerrad - Posted - 02/25/2023:  07:16:39

quote:

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Originally posted by alubin

I’ve been playing old time music for over a decade and I gotta say that I am currently bored out of my mind by this music. Maybe it was living through the pandemic and the lack of jams that it entailed, but I have little to no draw to this music right now. I developed other interests and listened to other music over the past three years. Post-punk, neue deutsche Welle, Afro-Pop, and Tuareg Music are all way more interesting to me now. Is there something wrong with me or have I just moved on? Please help me reconnect with this music I loved for over a decade but can currently not give a fig about.

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no one has to like anything they do not like.  no one has to like anything that I like.  They call it old time music because in the 1920s, the record companies tried to market this as the old music that people had moved on from as opposed to the current music.

Sometimes when I am working on learning tunes, or analyzing players for a book or a presentation or an article,  I will end up not listening to any old time music other than what I am working on and turning on Count Basie, Merle Haggard, or Billie Holiday.

It is not up to a bunch of posters on this board what you should like.  It is only up to you.

I am particularly pronounced and angry with anyone who tries to argue that old time music or anything else I like is better than anything else and a person should like it,  I know I fell into old time music and bluegrass as a teenager 60 or more years ago, largely because the neighborhood record store had very cheap lps sometimes 50c or a dollar (still some change to me at 13 in 1960) because the radio station a mile up the road in Bloomfield CT gave the store all the bluegrass records they received for free and a friend of my dad who worked in the store part time showed me where all the cheap records were.

You should like what you like and it really isnt any body's business on this list or anyone else on this planet's business one way or another.

writerrad - Posted - 02/25/2023:  07:24:17

quote:

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Originally posted by Earl-Picker

I get tired of , my honey died, left me, cheated on me, took my money, broke my heart

etc.....so I take a break and play rock guitar. Then I hear a hit banjo lick and its back to

the 5 string again.

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Yes, well  I have several acoustic guitars and seven banjos.  However, over the arc of my banjo playing over the last 20 years, I have neglected my electric guitar playing.  Iand let my electric, One of those Ibanez arch tops Ibanez got sued by Gibson for copyright infringement over and had to stop making, languish in the case.   Several weeks ago,  I decided to take it up to the best luthier around here, put hundreds of bucks of work into bringing it back up to playing shape, and bought a little practice amp.

It does really energize my banjo interest now that I do play the electric, not rock, but slow blues and a little swing.

writerrad - Posted - 02/25/2023:  07:35:33

quote:

Bob,  I think you hit on a point.  The current era of old time banjo playing seems to focus on learning fiddle tunes, not just learning fiddle tunes, but learning lead versions of fiddle tunes, learning to play their melodies.   

To be sure there is nothing wrong with that, but I find this practice complete non-sense, useless and boring except insofar as learning to play any tune broadens your instrumental capacity. 

People do not learn how to SING  with the banjo which seems to be one of its leading purposes.  At some jams I have been to if I start to sing a song which I have been singing for 50 or 60 years, people act like I just took my clothing off.

Moreover, people are taught to play the melody of a fiddle tune so they are not taught how to accompany a fiddle or lead instrument.  I have gone to local jams where people whose only banjo instruction has been this and had to tell them to let the fiddle or mandolin player play the melody.

Banjo can be whole lot of fun singing by yourself.  

I am very lucky that about 20 years ago a great local banjoist around here saw me play the banjo at a folk club and invited me to his house and sat me down and gave me some instruction on what either 2 finger and clawhammer were.  He gave me two things to take home and listen to to see what I shouLd aim for.  The first was the first tape (stil in the era of VHS) in Bob Carlin's clawhammer course and the first version of 2 albums I have now of a fellow name BOB BUCKINGHAM picking the banjo and guitar and singing every tune,

Thanks bob

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Originally posted by Bob Buckingham

If you are bored by old time, don't play it. The breadth of what I know old time music to be is far too wide to get bored with. I get tired of just playing fiddle tunes especially when by myself, but I then go on to the other old time music, which in essence is folk music. I like American folk music so I play blues, rags, different old and often odd banjo pieces. Try tackling the DVD sets that Mike Seeger or Art Rosenbaum put out. Both handle a breadth of old time with many challenges to the ardent student of banjo. When I ask myself, is it boredom or laziness, that usually tells me all I need to know.

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writerrad - Posted - 02/25/2023:  07:47:30

quote:

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Originally posted by Americanraga

Take heart. I met him and he's most humble and encourages people to play. I've decided genius is it's own thing and it doesn't hurt anybody to aspire to it. To the stars through the stars etc.

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Yes,  I know Jake Blount a bit from being at banjo history events and other things over the past 5 or 6 years.  He is an exceedingly modest easy going and kind person who is always giving too much back to others, getting in trouble at events where people are paying him good money to do big shows, and then showing up at a workshop and showing stuff to people for free.  He has developed some great instructional material both for banjo and fiddle/

He also sees himself as an artist who is not confined to "old time" revivalism as set down by say the NLCR 70 years ago.  He sees himself as also a creative song writer and poet and part of the literary, musical, and cultural movement called Afro-Futurism, a way of Black people making a kind of science fiction comment on racial, and in his case, also, spiritual issues.  This is not at all the old time revivalism that many of I engage in, replicating the methods or styles of traditional musicians of the 1920s or 30s   In the long run making a creative statement about the world may be more valuable than imitating how someone performed a tune 90 years ago!

But he still is one of the greatest old time players I have every seen .I have seen a few of them in the past 60 years.  He still plays and teaches old time music.  He seems to be an extremely modest and giving person with levels of generosity and basic down to Earth kindness that I will never be accused of!  

Edited by - writerrad on 02/25/2023 07:51:42

matchbookholder - Posted - 02/25/2023:  08:55:26

I started playing clawhammer in the 60s, and it's always been melodic for me. Not a recent development, as far as I'm concerned. But then, I managed to skip the fascination with Round Peak and just kept doing my thing. Melodic is challenging and was never boring to me. It got me recorded a couple times and winning prizes in contests.

As to the question of whether Old Time as a genre is boring, I can relate the following: I'm in a weekly OT jam that's been going on literally for years and years. People die, new folks show up, and it just keeps rolling along. Usually 12 -18 people per week. It's strictly instrumental. One of our strongest players, in criticizing some other genre - I can't remember which - said he didn't like it because it was "boring and repetitious." I pointed out that this was often leveled at our music, and we all had a good laugh. To us, it's not boring and repetitious, but endlessly charming. We revisit it weekly, but we also expand with occasional new tunes.

If OT no longer holds its charm for you, try something new. We'll still be here if/when you get back.

MikeSayre - Posted - 02/25/2023:  09:03:25

If you need something else, there's Kraftwerk, Shostakovich, Steely Dan, Bill Evans. Sometimes I need extended harmonic language, more melodic development, more developed song forms.
That being said, for me, old-time scratches an itch that nothing else does.

DocBanjeaux - Posted - 02/25/2023:  09:09:59

Heresy….. Lol

Paul Roberts - Posted - 02/25/2023:  10:12:57

quote:

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Originally posted by alubin

I’ve been playing old time music for over a decade and I gotta say that I am currently bored out of my mind by this music. Maybe it was living through the pandemic and the lack of jams that it entailed, but I have little to no draw to this music right now. I developed other interests and listened to other music over the past three years. Post-punk, neue deutsche Welle, Afro-Pop, and Tuareg Music are all way more interesting to me now. Is there something wrong with me or have I just moved on? Please help me reconnect with this music I loved for over a decade but can currently not give a fig about.

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For me, an essential ingredient in the art of music is keeping enthusiasm and inspiration alive, an art in itself. The OT appears to have a successful strategy for achieving this purpose; evident by his honest acceptance of his reality that he has grown tired of his previous musical approach and his exploration of a diverse range of musical possibilities, which may have been beyond his previous scope, widening his musical perspective.

Taking up different instruments and genres can be a healthy thing in the life of a musician. The experience of having played a certain type of music for over a decade doesn't disappear from one's knowledge, understanding and sensitivity about music. These experiences continue to *play* in the neural circuits, evolving one's musicality on an conscious level, through audiation, or below the surface, subliminally. 

The fact that boredom with a musical genre has propelled him into exploring at least four other genres, reveals a creative, adaptive force of that "boredom", to broaden his musical horizons. Whether or not he continues to play the banjo, or old-time music, may not be all that important in the scheme of his musical journey. But, if his previous musical interests reignite, perhaps it will be in a new way, with new insights and deeper sensitivities. Bon voyage. Enjoy the ride. 

jayaw - Posted - 02/25/2023:  10:39:10

I can certainly empathize with the OP about OT. Not that it’s boring, per se, but certainly that I got bored with it.

I guess it was 2018 that I first started learning banjo. I was totally obsessed. I was online constantly learning more, becoming an expert in all the minutiae. In 2019, I took my family on a driving trip from Arkansas to Michigan (with stops along the way) so I could visit Elderly Instruments and pick my dream banjo. I played and played and played some more. It’s all I did musically. Listened to it constantly, too. And eventually found a local OT Fiddlers Assoc. right here in town. I not only joined but sat on the board for a while.

I could go on… (and on…) but suffice it to say that I was deeply involved in the scene… until last year when my daughter was assigned to play the electric bass in her school rock band.

I bought a bass “for her” (ostensibly at least) and started messing with it myself, and man, it was so much fun! I had felt like OT banjo was my most authentic instrument, as in it allowed me (even within the strictures of the repertoire) to express my authentic self. But when I picked up the bass, I immediately thought “This is what I should have been playing since day one!” Of course, I was (and am) glad that I learned guitar and mandolin and banjo (and even a smidge of fiddle) and learned all the genres those instruments exposed me to down through the years, but I also had the sense that bass was now going to be “my thing.”

Fast forward to today: I am the bassist for a rock (and pop and country) band that I am a founding member of. We have weekly rehearsals, and soon we will begin booking gigs.

Until just the other night, I hadn’t opened my banjo case more than once or twice in the last 12 months; until this post, I hadn’t been on the site for at least that long. But you know what? The other night when I *did* get my banjo out, I enjoyed it more than I had been when I stepped away from it.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that absence sometimes does make the heart grow fonder.

Although well-meaning and maybe right for some, I wouldn’t suggest as others have that the OP try what in my mind would be sort of “forcing”banjo into other genres. I would suggest putting the banjo aside entirely and maybe learning/playing an instrument native to those different genres. Then, one of these days, you’ll come back to your banjo and play “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine” and remember what you loved about OT in the first place.

Hatteraskman - Posted - 02/25/2023:  14:54:59

My thought is that in your mind the method, the musical style/genre, and the type & tone of the lyrics, whether mournful, celebratory or neutral narrative, are components of a mindset or gestalt that you are bound by tradition to try to emulate, and you've reached the point where you've already got your self-rewarded T-shirt.

To go on, some part of the above triad has to change. I wouldn't presume to tell you what that change should be, but as a somewhat impassioned if challenged clawhammer guy, one of my liberating moments was learning to play one of Leonard Cohen's great songs in 6/8 time from 1966 - "Suzanne". After that, the boundaries of what was playable and interesting to play expanded enough to keep me going for the rest of my life. Just use the skills you already have, but do something different with them.

chip arnold - Posted - 02/28/2023:  08:55:19

Are you playing arrangements made by others, or are you learning the tune and coming up with your own arrangement? There's no creativity in learning other's arrangements (though certainly some may be so appealing that you just want to play them). Creativity energy begins to flow when you come up with your own arrangements.

Mister Lucky - Posted - 03/05/2023:  12:00:19

"Old time music has become a cult, and fiddle tunes is the obsession. The problem, from my perspective is that a lot of fiddle tunes sound alike, and the modern approach to "old time music" is to turn the banjo into the fiddle's little beyotch. You know the drill, capo up, and let the fiddle be the star of the show. Even bluegrass allows player to take individual breaks to make it interesting, and they sing. . Things that sound alike become boring. If players would add some songs and a little singing, like it was back in the day, things would get more interesting.

Edited by - Mister Lucky on 03/05/2023 12:12:58

jojo25 - Posted - 03/11/2023:  15:10:43

Hi Adam...lots of good advice here... a couple of years ago I decided to make a tune list for myself that I could use for playing at home...all by my lonesome...I had been tending to default to playing certain tunes over and over... so the list gave me a resource to use...at first I just scribbled down the names of tunes...then I decided to arrange them in a sequence that I would find more interesting...totally ignoring tunings and keys...I even arranged them into "sets"...like for a gig...as if anyone would ever hire me for a solo gig!...sometimes I use it rather strictly...marching thru the list in strict order...other times I just glance at it until I find a tune that intrigues me...my partner encouraged me to do my due diligence and note some background on each tune...and that helped me connect with the tunes...the list is far from being all OT...lots of tunes to sing...jazzy stuff...even Rolling Stones...yes...on the banjer with clawhammer...the list are tunes that I enjoy playing solo and that I think have some considerable merit as a solo piece...it is not a list of ALL the tunes I play...during the early days of the pandemic...no one to play with...I started playing scales every morning...it did wonders...not clawhammer, rather 3 finger picking...out of open G tuning...lately I try to play at least one or two pieces that really push me...like The Maple Leaf Rag...or Nola...I have been working on Nola since 1977 and not once I have I gotten all the way thru it cleanly...but it sure is fun to try...I am blessed to have a rich community of musicians to play with...in various configurations...that variety really helps...if you are bored doing OT...maybe you ain't doing it right...or with the right people...or with enuf different people...or maybe it was just not meant to be

Alex Z - Posted - 04/06/2023:  10:10:02

"Post-punk, neue deutsche Welle, Afro-Pop, and Tuareg Music are all way more interesting to me now. Is there something wrong with me or have I just moved on? Please help me reconnect with this music I loved for over a decade but can currently not give a fig about."

Nothing wrong with moving on.  There are no reasons to stay if musical tastes have changed.  Why would the poster want to "reconnect" with something he no longer cares about?

twelvefret - Posted - 04/08/2023:  07:49:46

Someone, somewhere once said, "old time is better than it sounds"

That said, it's mostly dance music. Keep consistent time and you get to play for the dancers.