Since I don’t play from tab (except as an occasional reference), I am sensitive to when my own arrangements of songs, even when quite faithful to the melody, nonetheless threaten to sound boring. Over time, I have made this (I’m sure, most unoriginal) observation: that when a song has lots of chords, or uses lots of chord inversions, there is far less need to vary your right-hand patterns or add ornamentation than when a song has few chords played in one section of the neck. I first came upon this observation years ago when playing some songs in C, a key that naturally forces you to go up the neck along with the melody (because much of the melody in C can fall on the first string, once the melody goes up the scale, you must use higher chord inversions). And when I finally paid any attention to my right hand, I realized I was playing the same pattern over and over. But it sounded fine because my left hand was moving around so much.
In other words, you need left-hand movement/variety or right-hand movement/variety but both are not essential at the same time. As I recall, Harold Streeter, in his “Banjo II” course, spoke at one point about “harmonic interest” and “rhythmic interest” and that songs should have one but don’t need both. Same basic idea.
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