This course teaches Beginner banjo in the fingerpicking/roll based style made famous by artists such as Earl Scruggs, Don Reno, Bela Fleck, and more. Part of the difficulty in learning 3 finger style banjo is knowing where to start. Many books and videos start you by teaching you how to read TAB, rather than starting you with HOWTOPLAYBANJO. I will start you with banjo playing only, the logic behind the roll patterns, and more:

We'll start by learning how to wear our banjo picks.

Next, we'll talk about how to get the best tone out of the instrument and how to place your hand correctly on the instrument. Right-hand technique is CRITICAL to getting a great sound out of the instrument.

With our right-hand, we start with the basic pinch pattern. This pinch pattern helps beginners establish good timing and is found in most songs.

Next, we move on to two ROLLPATTERNS called the alternating thumb and forward-reverse roll. We'll go over fretting the instrument and learning our basic chords G-C-D7.

We work on coordinating our right and left hands by combining our two roll patterns with the chords we've learned. The basis for most songs is being able to move from chord to chord while doing right hand patterns in proper timing.

After these fundamentals are established, we are ready to move on to learning songs. The first two songs we learn are "Cumberland Gap" and "Cripple Creek."

This course comes with audio recordings and a play-along track for "Cripple Creek." Before learning "CumberlandGap" we learn a new roll called the FORWARD-ROLL, as well as the E minor chord.

Finally, to make our songs sound even more polished and professional we learn ornamentations like SLIDES and HAMMER-ONS and how to add them to the songs we learned.

We wrap things up by learning the standard "Train 45."

By the time you are done with the course, you'll have a strong foundation in the fundamentals of 3 finger banjo playing so you can go forward on your own BANJOJOURNEY and learn whatever you'd like.