Banjo Picking – A Complete Method

Banjo Picking offers banjo players a valuable new method book and CD focused on training the picking hand. Square one beginners through seasoned professionals will find resources to improve and grow musically. The many exercises and tunes give banjoists all they will need to learn to pick confidently with complete control and facility. There are lots of photographs, many helpful suggestions on set up, tuning, ear training, hand positions, thumb and finger picks, timing and use of the metronome, rhythms, reading music and tablature, chords and music theory. A unique, integrated banjo notation is introduced. The CD contains the audio of many of the exercises and tunes, played slowly and deliberately. Once learned, players can then play them at other tempos of their choice. There's lots here for any finger picking five string banjo player to learn music from many genres. The needed tools for a player to develop their own arrangements are all here too. Many of today's top banjo players and teachers have endorsed the book.

The Minuet is fairly easy to play. Maybe you'd rather have the Allegro, from "Prelude, Fugue and Allegro", also by Bach.

Here's the Mp3 of the J.S. Bach Minuet in G, from the Anna Magdalena Notebook. My wife Eda plays the bass part on keyboard:

Many will not have seen the combined music and tablature. Those numbers are placed on the strings to be played. They're the left hand fingers, NOT fret numbers. Position marks above the staff indicate the fret which the fretting hand index finger is nearest, whether fretting or not. It's quite a bit like the classic fingerstyle notation used for that repertoire, but left hand finger indications are on the line of the string to be played rather than near the note heads, so that the five lines have the dual function of music staff and banjo strings. Instead of a plus sign for the thumb and one or two dots (for index and middle fingers), I use T, I, and M, as initiated by Pete Seeger and is in common use for most of the tab reading banjo community. Alan Munde described it as "a painless way to learn to read music".

See my website for the endorsements. Click on "Play It", and then, "Banjo Picking Promo" under "Books By Pete Pardee". Among others, Bill Keith, Bill Evans, Tony Trischka, Alan Munde and Pete Wernick wrote glowing tributes.