Saturday, June 30

Working on Beethovan's Moonlight Sonata, the banjo part off Bela's Perpetual Motion, there's a part where, for the first time in an uninterupted series of triplets, there's a single note rest. I was working on the part after that and having trouble going from the third fret/second string to the first fret/fourth string (see arrows below). But now, just as I tabbed it out below, I saw that I was using a clumsy fingering, barring the strings at the third fret to get that second-last set of triplets (left-hand finger below tab):

--------------------------------------------------------1--------------------------------------3----------3-----------3---------->>3------------------------------------------4----------4-----------4---------4---------------------------------------------- -X--------5-----------6-----------3----------->>1------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------0------------------------     m i   r    m    i   b    m   i    i   m       i     m  r     

But this is better:

--------------------------------------------------------1--------------------------------------3----------3-----------3---------->>3------------------------------------------4----------4-----------4---------4---------------------------------------------- -X--------5-----------6-----------3----------->>1------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------0------------------------     m i   r    m    i   b    m   i    m b       r     m  r     

Moonlight Sonata has been one of the most exciting pieces for me to learn, because it has caused me to rework the fingering so many times and I'm still not sure which fingering is the best in a couple cases. I have to try to see ahead to where I get more fluent and try to speculate which fingering is worth investing time in.

I initially stumbled across sheet music for a shortened version of the piece for violin and piano and typed it into Guitar Pro so I could print out a banjo tab. I knew that the Bela version was a lot longer, but I thought I could learn the beginning this way.

There was one place in the piece where I had to go from the first string/seventeenth fret to the fourth string/first fret. I kept working at it, and sometimes I made it sound okay, but it seemed impossible to make it reliably smooth. Then, when I went to learn the rest of the Bela version by putting Perpetual Motion on the slow downer, I realized Bela was playing a half-tone lower and therefore going from the sixteenth fret/first string to an open fourth string! Cool. But then I had to relearn the piece a fret down. I had been tuning the fifth string to G# to get an open string G# which helped with some of the transitions and I realized now that I could just do it in standard G tuning.

Although, as I have gotten further into the piece, I think Bela must have his banjo tuned somehow differently, because there is at least one place where he goes below the lowest D in standard G tuning. Also there's a place where I'm playing the right notes in first position, but where I'm playing open notes, I hear Bela's fingers sliding along the strings to get to the same notes??? Oh well, where Bela goes to C below the lowest D, I'm just going up to C at the firth fret/third string. Maybe I'll eventually discover he's got a whole different tuning and then I'll have to relearn it again.