Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Tough Lick Story

There's an old tune called Sourwood Mountain that Ron Stewart recorded on a CD titled Team Flathead - The Huber Banjo Sessions - a project that was originally intended to showcase the exceptional tonal characteristics of Huber banjos. If you're a fan of Huber banjos like me, you may be interested to know that Ron used a Lexington model Huber banjo (serial #102-4) with a maple neck and resonator to record this tune. If you're not a Huber banjo fan, I don’t know what your problem is, and you can just ignore the details mentioned above.

Back to Sourwood Mountain. I liked the song the very first time I heard it, but it really caught my attention when I purchased Ron Stewart's instructional DVD titled Ron Stewart - A Bluegrass Banjo Professional. The DVD by the way, is available from Acutab Publications.

Each tune to be taught (on the DVD) is played at full speed by a three piece band consisting of only bass, banjo and guitar. After the full band version, each song is then discussed and played at slower speeds with just the banjo for instructional purposes. For all you fans of the banjo, Ron is playing a Lancaster model Huber on the DVD which is owned by John Lawless. And once again, if you're not a banjo enthusiast, I don’t know what your problem is; you should just ignore the banjo details.

Bluegrass, being a highly improvisational style of music, allowed Ron to move away from the melody (just a bit) on the second break of the song. It was this moving away from the melody with a syncopated lick near the end of the second break that actually caught my attention the most about Sourwood Mountain. This syncopated lick is not on the Team Flathead recorded version, nor is it played during the instructional parts of the DVD; it was just something Ron did on the fly while playing the song at normal tempo with the band.

Now here’s the tough lick part of the story. I just spent close to two hours trying to insert that syncopated lick into Sourwood Mountain without success. Using a piece of software called Transcribe! from Seventh String Software, I was able to slow the tune down enough to figure out what notes Ron was playing and figure out a roll pattern to execute the lick. For reference, here is a link to a 9 second clip of Sourwood Mountain; the difficult lick starts at the 6 second mark.

It seems I can play the lick repeatedly without making a mistake while practicing, but I can’t seem to get it right in the context of the tune. My fingers know how to do it, my brain wants to do it, but they won’t cooperate. In my experience, one thing is for certain; whenever you hear the word "syncopation" in the context of playing a 5-string banjo, you know there’s trouble ahead!

I shall conquer this dilemma. Somehow.

UPDATE - Sep 25, 2008
After another hour (last night) of trying to make this difficult lick work, I was finally able to get it right a few times at the end of my practice session. The question is, will I be able to repeat it tonight? And the answer is, probably not; at least not at first.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Mike Knowing you ,I know that you will not stop till you have perfected it.Like I like to say "anything worth having is worth the hard work to get it"I know that you will get it.Keep practicing and before you know it it will become second nature to you Your Musical Pal Ken-(Fungus)Innis

Sunday, September 28, 2008 10:37:00 AM  

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