Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Bluegrass Banjo W/cd

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This tutorial seemed to be written well enough, but as a complete banjo newbie I found it frustrating. It's didn't seem to offer enough variety of learning exercises at each new skill, so that I felt stuck trying to learn the same example over and over. I gave up on this book and bought "A Manual on How to Play the 5-String Bango for the Complete Ignoramus" by Wayne Erbsen (...) and I'm now having a great time learning clawhammer style as well as the slides, etc. that seemed so frustrating in Tony's book. Maybe it's better if you have more banjo experience to start with.

The instruction in this book is easy to follow and teaches you the basic techniques you need to get a true bluegrass sound out of your banjo. The CD that comes with it, however, defeats it own purpose when Tony Trishka sings over the top of the banjo. Not only does he sound God-awful, but you can't even hear the music he's teaching you to play. Even on the instrumentals it gets frustrating because he's clearly not playing the exact same tab that is in the book. To his credit, however, every thing that is in the book, even the simplest 4 note exercises, are also on the CD.

So 5 stars for the book, 2 stars for the CD, 4 stars for Tony's pickin', and 1 for his singing. Unfortunately this may be the best instructional book for bluegrass banjo beginners available. And I do recommend it. Just don't expect the CD to help you through your learning very much.

Using this book I learnt to play a pretty fast and deft version of bluegrass yardstick Cripple Creek within four months, practicing for less than an hour a day - so it must work! The first two months weren't much fun, slogging thorough a hundred different versions of the same two tunes. But it picked up half way through, when real music was introduced and it became gratifying to play and improve.

One thing I should mention, everyone's been complaining that this CD's got (awful) vocals and guitar tracks masking the banjo (the very reason they bought it). This is true, it's pretty distracting. However, I ripped my version to MP3 to listen to in on my PC, and to allow me to loop small pieces easily etc (much easier than scanning on a CD player by the way). Anyway, I found out that most tracks have the banjo playing through one speaker and the guitar/vocals playing through the other. Just tip the balance of the speakers 100 % left and you've got isolated banjo track. I suppose it works for a normal hi-fi too.

At least that worked for the copy of the book I bought in a music shop in Australia.

This is a good book. Regardless of the other reviews, I didn't think the vocals were as bad as I expected. The book provides good instruction. As a guitar player, the transition was still tricky. Make sure you go slow and don't try to go through the book too fast. For the songs and exercises, start with a slow tempo to get the finger picking pattern, then speed up.

This is a good book, but is a little bit more advanced than someone would need with no previous playing experience. I found myself getting frustrated easily trying to keep up with the book.

A better book for the true beginner would be Banjo Primer, by Geoff Hohwald. I have reviewed Banjo Primer in detail over there.

Tony Trischka's book will be of value to me at some point because it contains an excellent collection of songs, but I doubt I will look at it until I've got a month or two of lessons underneath my belt.