Tangier Sound

Stephen writes:

Just found this site and am glad you’re back. I’ve been working on your DVD’s on frailing the banjo and have got the basic bum-ditty stroke down at about 100 bpm on the quarter note (worked it out with a metronome). I’ve been playing since around Dec of last year and your stuff is fantastic.

However, I can’t seem to get much faster than 100 bpm. Everyone around here plays bluegrass, so I’ve been sitting in jam sessions trying to keep up with these guys really ripping it and there’s no way. I’ve clocked you at over 160+ on the quarter note with such fluid ease it’s amazing.

What are some exercises or things I can do to build that speed? I know Steve Kauffman in his flatpicking videos says that to play faster, you just play faster, but how does one build that speed? Being an ol’ fart, maybe my mind doesn’t think that fast.

G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”

The same can be said of banjo players.

Forget the metronome. Speed isn’t a matter of how many bpm’s you can play. A metronome can only measure mechanical speed. In music we also have to deal with emotional speed.

Our emotions can affect how we perceive the speed of a song just as easily as it can affect how we view the passage of time.

In a jam we want to “keep up” with the group and that creates tension. That tension screws up our perception of time and we end up playing too slow.

In a performance we want to “get it right” and that creates tension. That tension screws up our perception of time and we end up playing too fast.

Lao Tzu explains this in typically poetic fashion:

Each moment is fragile and fleeting. The moment of the past cannot be kept, however beautiful. The moment of the present cannot be held, however enjoyable. The moment of the future cannot be caught, however desirable. But the mind is desperate to fix the river in place: Possessed by ideas of the past, preoccupied with images of the future, it overlooks the plain truth of the moment. The one who can dissolve her mind will suddenly discover the Tao at her feet, and clarity at hand.

“Dissolving the mind” is just a hoity-toidy way of saying not to give a hoot or a holler. In other words, instead of thinking of a song as something memorized ahead of time and then trying to run through those memorized motions in sync with a group of people it is a lot more practical to view music as something improvised on the spot.

I think that is why they call it “making music.”

For a concrete example of how this works all you have to do is head over to your kitchen sink. Turn on the tap and let the stream of water flow over your hand. Like water, music is a force of nature. Water will flow over your hand if you catch it from the tap and music will go right by you if you try to stop and think about what to do next. In either case you have the choice of either flowing with it or being overwhelmed by it.

Instead of working to play faster it’s a lot more practical to focus on getting used to the flow of music.

At your next jam just focus on streamlining your playing to fit the flow of the music. Follow the chord progression and stay in rhythm but forget about any specifics. Instead of thinking about the chord changes just let them come and react to them. Instead of thinking about what string to hit just let your hand fall where it will. Stop trying to “do” anything and just give yourself the time and space to get acclimated to the rhythm and flow of the music being played.

A really simple way to get into that groove is to play your initial quarter note strike on the fifth string. You can blend that with the chop to create a simple but effective bluegrass rhythm. I knocked out a quick and dirty workshop of blending frailing with the chop to help you get into that groove: tab file and this audio file.

Once you get used to just rolling along with the chord progression the next steps pretty much happen on their own. Once you get used to moving with the flow of a song you suddenly have time to start adding in licks, effects and other banjo stuff. What seemed horribly fast when you started becomes a walk in the park.

You stop trying. You start taking yourself lightly. Then you can fly.

Tomorrows Daily Frail workshop is going to be a quick look at a song called One Kind Favour – also known as Two White Horses or See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.

The song itself is pretty simple, but some of the stuff we are going to be doing in terms of phrasing is a little tricky. In order to keep things fun (and short) tomorrow morning (after all, I record the Daily Frail before breakfast!) I decided to post the tab a day early and give you some pointers on two particularly tricky measures.

The exercise – this is not an arrangement, it’s just an exercise to give you an idea of what you can do with this song so don’t waste any time trying to memorize it – can be downloaded here: one kind favor tab.

In the first measure we play a double hammer-on and a double slide.

Example One:

In the first half of the measure we are striking the fourth string with the picking hand and hammering-on the fourth and first strings at the third fret with the fretting hand.

The trick here is that you want your hammer-on to be crisp enough that both strings sound at almost equal volume.

In the second half of the measure we are striking the fourth and sliding on the first and fourth. Once again, for this to work you will want to press firmly on the first string during the slide to force some sound out of it.

The timing is still 1 2 & 3 4 &. This is just a drone effect.

Example Two:

In the first measure we have phantom hammer-on’s, which is cool, but the real action is at the end of the second measure. We have a basic frailing strum, a pull-off and a hammer-on – and the hammer-on is held for a quarter note (!) giving is a count of 1 2 & 3 & 4.

Tomorrow we’ll go over the tune and the exercises in more detail, but tonight have some fun just messing around with the tabulature and see what tunes you can fit these licks into.

Keep in mind that the blues isn’t about precision. It’s about feeling. Keep things loose and roll through anything you think of as a mistake.

Most of all, be cool.