Estimated reading time 4 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Do you have a hard time getting the authentic sound of bluegrass (or old time) banjo? How you tune impacts how you sound. Read more to learn how to tune like an authentic bluegrass banjo player.
This post will look at two bluegrass players. In addition, I’ve included an instruction video on how to play Dueling Banjos (which started life under the name Feuding Banjos).
This article uses musical terms. For definitions, see the Glossary at the end of the post.
Tune Like an Authentic Bluegrass Banjo Player: Leroy Troy
Our first banjo player, Leroy Troy, plays bluegrass and old time music. (Old time music contains pre-bluegrass elements, but remains distinct from bluegrass.) Like other old time players, he uses frailing or clawhammer right hand technique. Uncle Dave Macon, an early star of the Grand Ole Opry, had a major impact on Troy’s playing style.
In the video Leroy Troy “Grandfather’s Clock“, you can see that Troy tweaks his banjo’s tuning on the 1st, 4th and 5th strings (from 0:11 to 0:22). I suggest you watch the whole video. It’s a hoot, and it’s also really, really impressive playing.
Troy tunes without fingering any frets used as unison comparisons (comparing a fretted note to the same note on an adjacent open string). This goes right to the heart of how to tune like an authentic bluegrass banjo player.
What does tuning without frets have to do with anything? First, the most common banjo tuning, open G, has the strings as: GDGBD. This means that when you strum all of the open strings a G major chord will sound.
When a player uses frets, this forces the open strings into equal temperament (ET). ET makes a compromise between the number of notes an instrument possesses and the purity of the chords. (It gets technical, take my word for it.) Arguably the ultimate ET instrument, piano has compromised chords. The piano’s chords sound just barely acceptable because of ET.
However, when a banjo player strums all the strings and adjusts them without using unison fret comparisons, the open G chord tunes similarly to how a choir would.
How exactly does this affect the tuning? That question brings us to our next banjo player.
Grandfather’s Clock Video
Tune Like an Authentic Bluegrass Banjo Player: Dennis Caplinger
The Chart
Mobile users: for best results reading the music, tilt your screen 90o to the right.
Dennis Caplinger, our second player featured in How to Tune Like an Authentic Bluegrass Banjo Player, is a respected bluegrass teacher and performer. I pulled the cent values in the chart above off of a tuning track on the CD that came with Caplinger’s method book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Bluegrass Banjo Favorites. For a discussion of cents: click here.
Notice how the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th strings all conform to ET. However, the 2nd string is a little low. We’ve seen this before in other tunings. The second string contains the major third of the open G chord. By lowering the major third, Caplinger makes the chord sound better – a more locked in tuning.
His tuning perfectly fits the Supplemented Equal Temperament (SET) model. I created SET to capture the essence of what happens in all these different tunings that we’ve been looking at. For more on SET:
However, usually tunings don’t make such a precise match to SET, because ear adjusted instruments typically have much more “scatter” than this.
My guess would be that if we had Caplinger tune again, the cent values would come out differently. In fact, exactly this happens with other fretted string instrumentalists I’ve studied. When the artist does the same tuning at different times, it doesn’t come out exactly the same each time. However, the overall trends stay the same, which we’ll discuss in the concluding section.
The Videos
The first video below shows a more serious side to Caplinger’s playing. Conversely, the second video contains a lighthearted and highly modified version of Dueling Banjos, showing that Caplinger is scary good. (Sorry for the video quality.) Watch for him tweaking his 4th string at 6:31 in the video. No frets needed! (Maybe I should have called it How to Tune Like an Authentic Bluegrass Banjo Player on the Fly.)
The final video will teach you a traditional version of Dueling Banjos.
Dennis Caplinger, Steve Kaufman, John Moore & Missy Raines Pan Handle Rag Video
Bluegrass Etc. Dueling Banjo by Dennis Caplinger Video
Dueling Banjos on 5-string Bluegrass Banjo Video
Concluding Thoughts on How to Tune Like an Authentic Bluegrass Banjo Player
Discussing Universal Tuning Elements
So far in the intonation posts, we’ve looked at these tunings in five different styles of music:
- Bluegrass: Dennis Caplinger’s Open G Banjo
- Hawaiian: Keola Beamer’s Taro Patch (Open G)
- Rock: Keith Richard’s Five-String Technique (5 string Open G)
- Country Blues: Rory Block’s Open G
- Country Blues: Robert Belfour’s E Blues Standard Tuning
- Country Blues: Stefan Grossman’s Open D
- Hawaiian: Ukulele’s “My Dog Has Fleas”
- Historical: “Guitar without a Master”
All of the tunings listed above have a lowered major third, even as the other intervals have much greater variance in their tunings. Or in the case of Guitar without a Master, it has the lowered major third on the open G and A major chords.
(Similarly, on page 38 of their study “Fundamental Frequency Adjustment in Barbershop Singing,“ Hagerman and Sundberg found the major third to be a very important interval for barbershop quartet intonation.)
That’s what tuning without unison fret references will get you. This phenomenon crosses musical styles, instruments, nationalities, and ethnicities. It even stretches back to the 1850s with the tuning in Guitar without a Master. The sweet tuned major third appears to be a universal principal of tuning fretted string instruments when tuning without unison comparisons.
How do you tune like an authentic Bluegrass banjo player? You do it without frets, but not just for banjos, it works for any fretted string instrument.
Making a Case
I’m making a case.
Roll with the joke people! Read the previous section where I make the other type of case for how to tune like an authentic bluegrass banjo player. Have fun playing!
© 2022 Geoffrey Keith
Join me for in-person or online lessons today!
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