How to Play the Banjo: Cripple Creek

This will be Cripple Creek. Let us play it like this (Demonstration). That is the whole second part actually. Cripple Creek is a fun tune to learn backwards. The first part goes like this (Demonstration). Second part (Demonstration). Let’s just try playing a nice, simple rhythm to Cripple Creek (Demonstration).

Let us try playing a little bit of that slide with some rhythm patterns. We use a chicaboom with the slide. Again, it needs to connect right on (Demonstration) to the beginning of the slide and the slide itself needs to connect on the next chicaboom (Demonstration). You want to separate that out.

So here is the whole thing. I’ll play the B first and I’ll put an A part and then a B part (Demonstration).

Now, we are going to learn another thing about the slide. Many of you probably played some banjo before but you wanted to learn more about it and a lot of this is rudimentary so far. But a lot of times this stuff can be valuable—some of the details. This next part is particularly important. This has a lot to do with what makes the banjo sound the way it does. This is the big secret about how to make the banjo sound that way and this is probably why you want to play the banjo. It is how to make the sound of a left hand articulation like a slide go along with something you are doing with the right hand. The problem is our brains don’t like to do two things at once. They like to either slide or pluck. The trick is to do both. If you can get your hand to do both then you really be playing the banjo. It is just like learning to pat your head and rub your stomach. At first you can’t do it, but if you try a little bit you can make both things happen at once.

In this case we need the slide (Demonstration) and pluck the next string at the same time (Demonstration). It is very important, people go for years often times and don’t realize how important this is and until you teach yourself to do the two things at once it won’t come together. When you do the slide you want to make sure you have two distinct notes and the second of those notes will line up with your right hand striking with next string (Demonstration).

Now we’re going to try putting that in with our rhythm or with our role that is (Demonstration). We are sliding and you notice now we are putting the slide into a gallop role (Demonstration). You have to wait before you slide (Demonstration). Make sure you are not sliding and waiting with your right hand till the slide is done (Demonstration) that is not how you want it to sound. You don’t want to slide and then pick up with the right hand. The right hand is got to happen with the slide (Demonstration).


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