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Do the DUDUby Frank NordbergDownload this Article.
If you have a web site, it's often a good idea to add a message board to it. It's amazing how many good questions and ideas the visitors can come up with. Here's a very good question from the Irishbanjo. com message board: What's so important about keeping the DUDUDU action on Jigs / Reels etc. on the Banjo. [?] In case you haven't heard of DUDUDU (or simply shortened to DUDU ;-) before, it's the basic picking pattern for Irish banjo and most other .atpicking traditional and early music styles too. (Not just banjo all stringed instruments!) It simply means you play a steady alternating Down-Up-Down-Up picking pattern so that the notes played on a beat are played with a downstroke and the ones off the beat with an upstroke. It seems most really good acoustic .atpickers use this as the basis for their technique, and there are some very good reasons for that. It's all about phrasing. If you try to pick back and forth across the string, without changing the pick angle, pick "depth" or speed, you notice the up- and downstrokes sound distinctively different from each other. The downstrokes have a considerably fuller and louder tone than the upstrokes. Classical musicians work hard to eliminate that difference. They can spend hours upon hours patiently trying to get the tone as even as possible. But in most other musical styles (traditional music, early music, jazz...) we don't want to even it out! We want to use the difference musically: use the downstrokes to emphasise the notes on the beats and upstrokes to lighten the offbeat notes! By sticking to the regular DUDU pattern you get very much of the phrasing for free. You don't have to do it that way:
Of course there are times when the DUDU pattern simply doesn't work. Sometimes (quite often actually) there are three notes to the beat. In those cases DUDU actually destroys the phrasing. Sometimes things are simply moving so fast it's simply physically impossible to do the DUDU. That's where things like economy picking comes in. And of course, sometimes you want to break the rules to get a special musical effect. But really, if you want to sound good you should try to stick to DUDU as much as possible. You can do without, but it's not worth all the extra work. And remember: Most players seem to be very concerned about playing the right notes, but it's actually far more important to play the notes right. In fact, the only aspect of music that is even more important than that, is to keep the beat and DUDU can help you with that too. Once you've got your picking hand going steadily back and forth across the strings, the beat comes almost automatically. You simply can't loose it. If you break the pattern, things get - not impossible - but much more difficult. The conclusion: you don't actually need the DUDU at all, but it makes the two most important things about music so much easier to get right. Lord McDonald's Reel is a very good tune for practising the DUDU. Start with an upstroke and then play down-up-down-up all through the tune. As usual I've included tabs for all the most common banjo types and tunings. Click here to listen to a midi of the tune. Tuning GDGBD Tuning DGBE Tuning EADGBE Tuning CGBD Tuning CGDA Tuning GDAE Tuning GDAD Tuning DADA The Author He works as a guitar teacher and freelance musician in Bodø, Northern Norway, and is the webmaster
of a number of music sites including Musica Viva, The Irish Banjo and The Blues Banjo. |
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