How to Play the Banjo: Down the Road

Next song is called Down the Road. The first thing we need to learn about this next tune is just how the melody goes. The melody of down the road goes like this (Demonstration). The second one is a little more simplified and leads that as our basic melody. We can either do that with some rhythms (Demonstration).

Lets go be familiar with just the melody of this song now we just learn it with rolls and slides and pull offs and everything (Demonstration). We’ll play that a little slower (Demonstration). That has a lot of things we’ve learn in already. You might have noticed there was a chicaboom in the middle of the second part of it (Demonstration)—here (Demonstration). You need to make sure that really leads into the following slide (Demonstration).

Now we’re gonna learn something else about forward rolls. You notice in Cumberland Gap we played a roll and started with a thumb (Demonstration) and went into the index. Full roll does that. One beat, if you play a forward roll will be on one finger (Demonstration) and the next beat will be on the next finger (Demonstration) and so on. I call this track in the down beat because you want to track the down beat through whatever you are playing. It is most complicated when you are playing forward rolls or backward rolls for a period of time.

Now we’re gonna use the skill we learned of playing one note louder than the others at a given time, but it is not gonna be the same note we’re gonna keep changing (Demonstration). When you’re playing a song that uses a lot of forward rolls you need to keep this on mind because if you just try and count your forward rolls you’re not gonna stay on the beat. You can also do this exercise with the backward roll (Demonstration).


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