How to Play the Banjo: Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arm

All right, let us do another song. This one actually is a song with words and a real traditionally complete song. It is Rolling In My Sweet Baby’s Arms. The basic melody is like this, (guitar playing). I played the basic melody with just a little bit a rhythm in there, (guitar playing).

Let us talk about that melody a little bit. Try playing it through in doing some different rhythm things with the basic melody. We have used are around the world row with the slide before (playing guitar. And that works really good for this melody. Notice the last line of Baling Cabbage down there as our first song, (guitar playing. Use that same little melody fragment, walking from the second string to the third string. And this pattern work great for that, (guitar playing), and it does. (guitar playing), drop it down to the third string for that melody fragment, this thing works great. So, we can play our first part of this song using that, (guitar playing). You even through some gallops in there if we wanted, (guitar playing).

So that is just the first half of the song. I just wanted to go through that as a basic melody idea. Let us add one element and if we can still hear the melody while we are playing this. Instead of just a straight, (guitar playing) we are going to add pull off in there. And here is the melody goes, (guitar playing), (guitar demo), (guitar playing). We are going to use two phrases, we will use it with that pull off and practice that into a little slower and see if we can hear the melody while we are playing all this notes, (playing guitar).

So we note two phrases. Try playing that and try keeping hear the melody. All the student I have had, have a hard time here in the melody once they have played all the fancy notes that come along, even no melodies still in there. So it a good exercise of practice hearing that while playing it.


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