It’s been three years since I started playing clawhammer style banjo and I still enjoy it every day.

I thought I would post how I practice and play in case there are other like me who are different style learners.

First, where I am today:

I can now play 24 tunes from memory across multiple tunings including open G, double C, double D, A (capo up from G), double C, sawmill and now with Tom Collins latest boot camp g#EG#BE.

I am terrible at playing with others in jams because I just don’t hear the rhythm or I IV V nature of music very well having not been brought up in it either playing or listening and songs just don’t make sense to me that way.

I have a weekly session with my teacher Hilarie Burhans who is fantastic at working with me in virtual sessions. We typically work on one song per week but lately can shift to two.

I love to practice and I spend about an hour per day total with

1) warming up, practicing scales down and up the neck in a given key and practicing inversions of the basic chords for that key with no regard for a song. I play with with my index or middle finger for percussion and I have drills for drop thumbs, pull off, alternate string pull off, alternate string hammer on, galax lick and shifting the timing from 4/4 to 3/4. I do this at least once a day for about 15 min every day. I’ve developed a written formula for the warm up in my notebook but these days I just do it from memory.

2) I practice four to five tunes I know in a given key so I don’t have to change using strum machine. An example is playing in A tuning aDADE the songs Polly put the kettle on, Angeline the Baker, Ducks on the Millpond, Sail Away Ladies and Squirrel Hunters. I set up strum machine to play these in order but I change the order every time and I ramp up the speed over time typically starting at 80 bpm and going up to 120-125 which is about my limit. This can change in any given day with a new tuning. I try to work with four songs at a minimum from the tunes I’ve learned and I change tunings for it frequently so the songs and tuning become better patterns for me. I started this over a year ago at 30-40 bpm for the songs so I’ve come a long way. What I’m trying to do is hear the first part of the tune at each change and jump in and recover from getting lost quickly and getting back to the song. I also add the flourishes and up the neck work that Hilarie helps me learn for the tunes.

When I learn a new tune I do it in a very boring way with breaking up the tune into measures but I actually practice them at starting with a measure going to jumps past each measure because if I only practice a given measure I wind up missing the transition. I will do the tune in a very boring way. I’ll oractixw the first 4.5 measures for over a week over and over and over shifting up and down the neck and with inversions to really understand how the tune is put together. I’m weird in that I care a lot more about learning the music theory and how the tune is put together than in just playing it to join in a jam. I will typically take a section and work my way through it over 2000 times over part of a week playing it at different speeds with strum machine and writing the actual music notation in my notebook. I don’t rely on tab at all but I do take each note in what I learn and convert it to a music score similar to piano though without the bass and treble clef . I just use the treble clef of a piece of sheet music but the banjo is typically one octave below the standard treble clef. In this transform, in open G tuning


g is Second line from the bottom
D in D3 is Space below the three ledger lines below staff
G is Space below the ledger line below staff
B is Ledger line below staff
D in D4 is Space below the bottom line of staff

I write this for myself for every tune I learn and I transpose it up the neck with any chords noting the inversions.

I do play with other beginners. One friend is a flat picker guitar player with only a few jimmy buffet tunes to his name, one is a mandolin player who picked up mandolin in much the same way I chose banjo-it looked cool.

We play together almost every morning at 6 am after workouts but I wouldn’t call it a jam session. We are all engineers / scientists. We use whiteboards, strum machine, discussions of where the tune is broken down, how each instructor teaches the tune, readings on music theory that we have done in the evenings and reviews of songs recorded by others.

An example is shady grove recorded by jerry Garcia and David Grisman from the album of the same title. We broke it down into the notes and timing and even the way the vocals come across. We all learned shady grove in practice separately and played it many times doing the morning work writing on a whiteboard on the front porch and discussing how the tune comes together and is played.

this is not a normal learning path and jam session path but it's what has worked very well for me in learning and I am learning a whole lot.   I learn best by reading and I really prefer technical explanations to just hearing and mimicking because that leaves me not understanding the why.    
 

I wanted to share this here because I enjoy the leaning path I've developed and the amount of music I've picked up.

i have subscriptions to Patreon for Tom Collins including his banjotron neck and tuning system, Hilarie Burhans and her whole corpus of tunes and breakdowns and a full subscription to strum machine.

i take lessons weekly from Hilarie for one hour each virtual lesson.

i also attended Midwest banjo camp this year in June and learned an incredible amount and intend to go back for more instruction.

Edited by - jsinjin on 09/29/2026 12:46:09