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Over the years I’ve taught hundreds of students the basics of bluegrass 5-string banjo, many of those in a class I held every semester at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington, Indiana.
I compiled the textbook for the class, presenting the essential information a new banjo picker needs to master. Click the image on the right to download a free PDF of my Banjo Primer. ===>
Compared to teaching guitar, the basics of banjo are much more straight-forward — not because banjo is such an easy instrument to play (it isn’t), but because the fundamental techniques involved have been pretty much chiseled in stone, and can be easily traced to one man, the late great Earl Scruggs. Earl was one of the few musicians in history who can not only be called a master, a virtuoso, but also an innovator — one who develops a technique or style that truly changes the character of an instrument and serves as a primary source of inspiration to all who follow in his footsteps.
Like most five-string banjo players, as a child Scruggs used a two-finger picking style. Although some North Carolina banjo players employed an experimental three-finger style, Scruggs’ first attempts to master this new style failed. Then one day, mindlessly playing a tune called “Ruben,” Scruggs looked down to discover that he was picking with three fingers — his thumb, middle and index fingers. He recalled that he ran around the house shouting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I can play with three fingers!” Over the ensuing years and decades, Scruggs became the first banjoist to truly master and refine three-finger picking, developing a style that emphasized melody lines and a syncopated rhythm. In fact, he so profoundly influenced the three-finger picking technique that it is still known as the Scruggs Style and has remained essentially ubiquitous for bluegrass banjo music to this date. Source: Biography.com
StringDancer Banjo Primer
(free download)
