Peghead Nation has released a new course with noted banjo instructor Bill Evans, covering a topic of great interest to players as they reach the intermediate stage: making up your own breaks based on the melody of a song or tune.
Creating Bluegrass Banjo Solos is now available online with a Peghead Nation subscription. Bill spends time in these lessons teaching how to find simple melodies first, as they might be sung but on your banjo fingerboard, and then how to fit them into the common rolls used in bluegrass banjo.
This is often one of the more confusing aspects of mastering the Scruggs style, as Earl’s forward roll concept can push the actual melody notes a beat or two forward or back, giving more of an approximation than a clear statement of the tune in a song. Learning to do this is tricky, but can be taught, and that is the purpose of this course.
This will be a continuing process; the four lessons currently posted are just the beginning. Bill is committed to at least a total of 36 lessons in this course, with one new video each month. But he expects it will go even longer than three years, as his Bluegrass Banjo course has 100 lesson videos in it. As long as people continue learning and enjoying the new melody course, he will keep it going.
He says that as the lessons go on it will become more challenging, so as you get more familiar with the subject matter, more difficult concepts will emerge.
“Given that amount of content, I’m going to get into some more advanced ways of thinking about soloing, using harder tunes, and also bring in improvisation ideas as well, from inserting licks to finding different ways to play familiar licks.”
Evans also shared a testimonial from a student who has just started the Creating Bluegrass Banjo Solos course, finding it just what the doctor ordered.
“I am only one module done with this course but I really wanted to say thank you for making this, and it is going great so far.
I have been playing banjo almost five years and have been afraid to jam because I don’t know what to do in a break, and there are only so many times you feel like you can get away with shaking your head when your turn comes up.
I have mostly learned tab or tunes by demonstration, and when I would try to play a memorized break at jam speed I would freeze or it would fall apart. I live in a somewhat rural area but we just got a bluegrass jam started up monthly. I have gone to a few banjo camps, etc, but no one teaches ‘How to figure out how to start taking breaks.’
Recently I embarked upon the quest of starting over with a new strategy – just learning to pick out the melody of a song and then build around that. I am aware that this should not be rocket science, but because of the way many of us are learning these days by finding tab or watching videos online it kinda is.
Your course could not have come at a better time as I have been working on my own to pick out melodies and then fit rolls or licks around them but have struggled with a disconnect on how things fit based on note length, etc.
I feel so excited to keep doing your course and like it is going to be a huge breakthrough for me. I have also been challenging myself to fail at jams and just play a break even if it is random rolls over the chords or picking out just a few of the correct notes – to get over my terror.
Anyhow, thanks so much. This is just the course I needed!”
Peghead Nation charges a fee of $25/month for a single course, with all of the videos in the course available to you as a subscriber. Adding a second course is only an additional $15/month. There are no contracts and you can cancel any time., though they do offer a 25% discount on annual pre-payment.
Here’s Bill’s introductory video for the course.
Tablature is included with each lesson.
New students can get their first month free by signing up online.
