It’s easier to play a banjo fast than slow

Now wait just a dern minute there Banjo Paul…just what do you mean?! How can it be easier to play fast than to play slow? Has Banjo Paul flipped his lid? Gone off his rocker? Does his elevator not reach the top floor? Did someone grease his reality pole?! Well not exactly, and some more explanation is in order here. Hang with me and you’ll see what I mean.

Good pickers can play fast…great pickers can play slow

Does that statement seem counter-intuitive? It might look a little bit strange, but there is good wisdom in what I just wrote. Hear me out. There are a couple of sub-points to what I’m discussing here, so let’s look at both angles.

Sub-point #1: play slowly to prove you know the song

I have had students come back and sit down for their scheduled lesson after trying to work with the material from the previous lesson at home. In some instances I might have them demonstrate a song such as Cripple Creek for me. I can remember more than once when a student would roll off a bit of a rambling, jumbled version of the song. Correct in some places, loose and sloppy in others; maybe not quite memorized right, etc, and usually much too fast for their ability. I’ve then often said to the student: “alright, now play that song from memory, slowly, one string/note at a time…painfully slowly.” The student would dive in, get about three notes out…and be totally stumped. They would try again more than once and not get more than a measure or two of the song rolled off before they had to admit defeat. They didn’t have the intimate familiarity with the song that they thought they did. This comes back to how they learned it and practiced it.

It’s easy to hide many mistakes in speed. I liken the experience of trying to play a song slowly and methodically to the analogy of rolling a barrel up and down a hill. Let’s start at the top of the hill: if I asked you to roll a barrel down the hill, you’d push it over the crest of the hill and off you’d go. You wouldn’t have to expend a lot of energy, even if the hill was only at a slight decline. Mostly you’d have to put out some effort to steer the barrel, but for the most part, once the barrel took off, it would continue to roll of it’s own volition. When you reach the bottom you’d beam a smile at me and say “ha! Nothing to it!”

Now then Mr. Smarty pants…let’s roll that barrel back up the hill. A-ha! Not so fun now, is it? Even on a hill without very much incline, you’d have to work and labor at getting that barrel from the bottom to the top. The barrel does nothing of it’s own volition to aid you in getting it to the top. But…if you practiced every day, rolling the barrel from the bottom to the top, I dare say you’d get better and better at. After a few attempts it wouldn’t be quite as hard as the first attempt.

Play Cripple Creek slowly, methodically, one string or note at a time. Of course, it could be any song, the lesson is still the same. To jump in and roll off the song at 150 b.p.m., for instance, is akin to pushing that barrel over the crest of the hill and off you go. Following the barrel down the hill doesn’t qualify you to be a “barrel wrangler”. Playing Cripple Creek at top speed doesn’t qualify you to be a “banjo wrangler”, especially if you can’t hear how wrong some of the sections are due to the noise and the flurry of activity. Much like the barrel pulling itself down the hill, any song you launch into fast will pull itself along and mask the fact that you really don’t know it like you should. Let’s reverse direction and push that barrel up the hill now. Play *insert song title here* slowly, one string at a time, at less-than performance speed. You won’t have the benefit of stumbling through and letting momentum just carry you. You’ll have to labor with the song, pulling it out of your brain one note at a time. If you have truly memorized the song well and can play each of notes as well as the the pull-off’s, hammer-on’s, and slides well, then it’ll show as you pick along within the song.

Any time that you think you have your song memorized and playable, dial it down to a painfully slow, one-string-at-a-time pace and see if you can pull all of the notes out of your head. Once you can play the song from memory this way, then it’s safe to speed ‘er up and bring it up to peformance pace. You won’t struggle as much at performing the song if you do this successfully.

Sub-point#2: work on playing slow songs well

I wrote above that good pickers can play fast but great pickers can play slowly. This statement doesn’t speak as much to proving how well you know the song as it does to your artistic merit. It’s important that you don’t focus on doing everything at 275 b.p.m. While it’s fun to go fast, at the same time it doesn’t prove your mettle as a banjo player. Playing fast doesn’t mean you are good. The really good pickers who can flex their banjo playing muscle are the ones who can come out of Foggy Mt. Breakdown at break-neck speed, and then go into Tennessee Waltz and play it beautiful and artisitically with a lot of feeling, flair, and decoration. Of course you can insert any one of thousands of slow, pretty songs in place of Tennesse Waltz, the point is the same. Take a listen to Jimmy Mills playing How Great Thou Art for a mind-bending dose of reality on just how great a banjo player he is…and how great a banjo sounds when played slow.

Invest the time and energy into developing your neck knowledge. Learn how to move around within chord fragments, applying tasty, decorative right-hand techniques to your overall ability. There are a lot of resources out there to help you with this. The main thing is that you have to focus on seeking it out, learning to be a well-rounded picker, without focusing on driving the guitar players crazy with break-neck speeds.

If you can play at 290 b.p.m. and do it well, congratulations. That’s certainly a skill and not easy to do. But can you also then play that sweet love song or that spritual gospel song that moves along at a soulful pace? To quote the famous country song: “have you paid your dues, can you moan the blues, can you bend them banjo strings?” (Well, alright, the song says “guitar strings”, I just plagiarized it and twisted it for my benefit.)

Those are my lousy opinions. What are yours?

Have you had any experiences like what I’ve written about here? Have you found it tough to play slowly and prettily? I’d love to hear from you on this topic. I hope you’ll consider leaving some comments below. My readers and I can learn a lot from what you have to say. Don’t forget to click on the “subscribe to comments” choice below so that you can be alerted if anyone chimes in on what you wrote. I value the back-and-forth that I have with my readers. Also, if you’d like to receive an email alert each time I post a new blog article, you’ll see a sign-up form for that too.

Thanks so much. I’m glad you are here and I thank you in advance for your comments. And, as I always say: pick ‘em if ya got ‘em!

Banjo Paul
“Wunse, I coodn’t even spel bango pikker…now I are one!”
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