pweller - Posted - 02/21/2007:  11:42:09

So I've played guitar about 2 years, and I started Irish tenor just recently. The guitar teaching helped a lot, as it was very similar, just on a smaller fretboard. However, I never could use my little finger on guitar or banjo. Is this a problem which will haunt me later on? I can play things like the "Kesh Jig" which require little finger reaches to the 7th fret by just sliding my ring finger up, so is this really a problem?

stanw - Posted - 02/21/2007:  12:20:26

it will eventually get in the way of speed and clairity. Having said that there are many players who don't use their little finger. I worked on the problem by playing scales and then breaking them up into other execises. eg. up two notes down one to the octave and then back down while using the same fingering and doing it very slowly.
Fiddle tunes are great way to incorporate proper fingering into your regular playing. Start very slowly and use a metronome to guide your increase in speed.
Stanw

mikeyes - Posted - 02/21/2007:  13:19:29

There are plenty of Irish banjo players who use the mandolin style (i.e. assigning more than one fret per finger) including Barney McKenna who is the first influential banjo player in the genera and several other well known players. But they are at a master level and their music is that way in spite of the handicaps of the mandolin style. Using a finger assignment (one per fret) or guitar style is cleaner and faster for a beginner to use.

There are advantages to the mandolin style if you are coming from an instrument tuned in fifths such as the mandolin or violin mainly you get to keep a lot of the licks you already know and making the transition to a guitar style causes some confusion for a while.

When you have to go to any note about a high A on a banjo you end up going to a second position (sliding the ring finger to the A note on the E string) or using the exact same technique as the mandolin style but you still use your little finger to hit the B note. The very best players use a combination of styles because that is what works with the music in their head.

It is very important to establish a basic technical style before you try to develop a creative style. By doing so you have a vocabulary and a set of rules to follow or in the case of creative moves, not follow. Either way you know where you are coming from and where you are going. If you use a hodge-podge of techniques to start with , you will probably miss some basic way of making music that you won't have when you need it. One of the reasons for doing exercises such as scales is that you have to be able to eventually just play the music as it enters your head and not worry about technique.

Thre is nothing wrong with playing the banjo the way you are right now, I just think it short changes you. If you ask any master level mandolin player about the little finger, they will tell you that they cannot play their music without a strong little finger even though in first position they don't use it all that much.

In Irish music there are a few tunes that demand that the little finger be used on strings other than the E string on a banjo. Ballydesmond #1 Polka is a good example. Come to think of it, that may be the reason you don't hear it on the banjo all that much <G>

I found that instead of my mandolin playing worsening after I made the switch on the tenor banjo to guitar style, it got a lot better because my little finger was so much stronger.

Mike Keyes
http://www.banjosessions.com
http://www.mikekeyes.com

pweller - Posted - 02/21/2007:  14:24:52

Yeah, one of the first things I did was learn the D and G scales. In guitar, without the pentatonic scales, I would've been dead in the water. Same thing with banjo, although I haven't gotten to the point of improvisation.