Banjo Books
This book presents more than 70 tunes in the unique highly developed clawhammer style known as "Round Peak" -named after the Blue Ridge Mountain, North Carolina community where it originated. While not intended for the absolute beginner, this book will benefit players at various experience levels.
With the Three-Chord Christmas Songbook you will need only minimal playing skills and three chords–G, C, and D7–to accompany each song in this great book. The jam-packed book is invaluable for all beginning musicians, casual musicians, teachers, family bands, and performers. Melody, lyrics, and chords are included for all songs.
The Strum Together series enables players of five different instruments – or any combination of them – to “strum together” on dozens of great songs.
This new, easy-to-use format features melody, lyrics, and chord diagrams for five popular folk instruments: standard Ukulele, baritone Ukulele, Guitar, Mandolin, and Banjo.
Learn from the best. Grandpa Jones was a country music legend and a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was very well known and respected for his own style of clawhammer banjo.
Long-time banjo picking ace Alan Munde brings his considerable banjo arranging skills to some of the most played sons in the bluegrass tradition.
Alan Munde has long been a major artist in the 5-string banjo world.
Well-known composer, performer, bluegrass and five-string banjo specialist Janet Davis has arranged this fantastic book of Christmas songs for five-string banjo. Selections include material for various levels of ability and offer wide variety of songs for the holiday season. Tablature only with lyrics for each song. The companion Online Audio is included. This is a stereo recording which contains all the music in the book, played slow and up-to-speed. The fast version includes guitar accompaniment.
Finally! A chord book written for the young beginner (or even beginners of any age) showing a creative and simple way to learn and play banjo chords. Chords are taught beginning with the most essential to more advanced. Chords are presented with exercises that build upon each other and eventually lead the student to playing logical and common chord progressions. These progressions include I-iii-vi-ii-V-I and twelve bar blues in many different keys. Chords are shown in chord diagram form with photographs showing finger positions in relationship to the fretboard. Examples and exercises are presented in strum bar notation.
This chart provides the most used and needed scales for banjo in easy to read fretboard diagrams. Scales include major, minor, major pentatonic, minor pentatonic, harmonic minor and dorian. Scales are shown from the 4th and 3rd string roots. A must have for banjo players
Ragtime music has a character all its own. While it lends itself ideally to a variety of settings and moods, it always maintains its unique joyful feeling. The banjo is an instrument ideally suited for ragtime. The bright crisp banjo sound truly adds a new dimension to the ragtime feeling.
Easy to play five-string banjo arrangements of twenty-four Children's favorites by banjo master Ross Nickerson. Not only are these songs fun to play but from an instructional standpoint they are perfect for helping you develop the ability to bring out the melody in the bluegrass banjo style. Accenting the melody within the steady rhythmic roll of banjo playing is one of the biggest challenges facing banjo students and these familiar melodies are ideal for your development of that skill. Each song is arranged and performed using proper three-finger bluegrass technique. The arrangements are carefully designed to bring out the melody, but easy enough for a beginner or intermediate player to learn quickly.
This beginner's text for the four-string tenor banjo shows tuning, basic chords, and songs to sing and strum. This title is available as a book alone or as a set with its companion Online Audio. Written in standard tenor banjo tuning (CGDA) in standard notation only with chord symbols and lyrics. Tuned for Mandola
This chart shows essential chords and secondary minor chord relationships in all 12 keys for the tenor banjo in C-G-D-A tuning.
Ready to take your Banjo playing up a notch? Renowned teacher Fred Sokolow presents valuable how-to insight from which Banjo players of all styles and levels can benefit.
The text, photos, music, diagrams and accompanying CD provide a terrific, easy-to-use resource for a variety of topics, including techniques, ear training, performance, and much more.
Many folk banjoists draw influence from greats such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, The Weavers, Peter, Paul and Mary, and many others. These folk musicians travelled the country singing the folk songs that many of us now know, some of which are still played in jam sessions. First Lessons Folk Banjo is a great introduction to learning these types of folk songs on this wonderful instrument. Included are lessons on singing and playing backup with the banjo, strumming and picking exercises, and many classic folk songs. The music is written in tablature. Includes access to online audio.
The definitive text on playing harmonics (chimes) on the 5-string banjo in G tuning! In addition to traditional chiming methods, the author’s new T3N technique for creating banjo harmonics will add new dimensions to your playing. While particularly useful in the three-finger style, T3N can be used in other banjo styles and on other stringed instruments.
This insightful book is about sound perception and execution on the banjo. Its purpose is to shed light on simple aural connections unique to this instrument, including closed-position as well as open-string fingerings found throughout the entire fretboard. In notation and tablature.
The Banjo Encyclopedia is a comprehensive, in-depth banjo instructional tool that covers the many intricacies of bluegrass banjo playing, including numerous topics that may have been overlooked in banjo instruction to date. The Banjo Encyclopedia can take a student from the beginning, to intermediate, and right through to more advanced styles of banjo playing. Online Audio included.
After the Civil War, the “up picking” finger style of playing the 5-string banjo came into vogue – eventually finding its way into the Victorian parlor and, later, college glee and music clubs. The original down picking style didn't entirely die out, because throughout the reaminder of the 19th Century, new methods for the banjo often included a number of songs in the older two-finger banjo style of performance. Perhaps the most intricate set of songs to appear in the “original” banjo style were these 34 progressive pieces found in Frank B. Converse's Analytical Banjo Method from 1887. Those songs, presented in this book for clawhammer banjo, offer a nice mix of banjo characteristic pieces, medleys and new compositions from Converse.
Authored by Mac Robertson, Robbie Clement & Will Schmid, this innovative method teaches 5-string, bluegrass style. The method consists of two instruction books and two cross-referenced supplement books that offer the beginner a carefully-paced and interest-keeping approach to the bluegrass style. Covers easy chord strums for the beginner; learning tablature; right-hand rolls characteristic of bluegrass; techniques such as hammer-on, slide and pull-off. The book includes access to audio tracks and video tutorials for download and streaming.
Here is the Lost Heritage of the Irish-American Banjo!
The Irish-style Tenor banjo has become immensely popular of late, yet the roots of Irish influence on American banjo music extends right back to the 1840s, when the legendary Joel Sweeney picked up a gourd banjo from Black American banjo players, and proceeded to perform 'jigs, reels and breakdowns'. Other Irish-Americans played a leading role in the development and popularity of the banjo in America, and Rob MacKillop has collected 27 of their finest pieces in this collection, the first of its kind
The Getting Into Bluegrass Banjo book and Online Audio by Alan Munde is the accumulation of successful teaching concepts developed in his 40 plus years as a professional bluegrass musician and teacher. Munde presents a straight-forward and well-founded course of bluegrass banjo essentials. Designed for those who have never played a stringed instrument to those taking up bluegrass banjo as a second instrument