#Banjo images how to
#Banjo images movie

I did all the frame restoration, the brakes, replaced the rings and the engine and did a valve job the old fashioned way.” Later he acquired a 1910 single cylinder Brush. “The body was off the frame, the engine was out. “I took the car completely apart,” he says. When he was 15 he bought his first car, a Model A Ford. Keith was a dissector of more than music.

#Banjo images how to

In short, he figured out how to play melodies and scales with higher notes being played on lower strings-a counterintuitive concept to string players of any genre. Keith is one of bluegrass banjo’s most influential players thanks to the melodic style he developed. I don’t know what you call it, but it’s the kind of stuff I’m into,” says Bill Keith. “It’s sort of an engineering mindset or logical mindset. It takes a certain kind of problem-solving to learn how to work melody notes into that string-changing ringing sound. (On other stringed instruments, like the guitar or the fiddle, it’s common for several consecutive notes to be played on the same string.) This means that melody notes are not always where you want them. To get the ring and drive associated with the banjo, each consecutive note is played on a different string. This has something to do with the fact that eliciting the traditional sound requires three fingers playing five strings with four beats to a measure. With a piano, a trumpet, or even a saw and a bow, if you need to play a note of a melody, you play the note of the melody. The bluegrass banjo is not as straightforward as other instruments.

Bill Keith engineered what have become standard tuning pegs for the banjo.

So what leads the engineering-minded to pick up the five-string? The answer has something to do with how the instrument is played and how the instrument is made. “I will say that the number of engineers I have run into playing banjo is statistically significant,” says Stan Moore, an electrical and computer engineer and an accomplished banjo player for some 35 years. Lamar Grier, also a “Blue Grass Boy” for Monroe, went on to work for IBM for 17 years.Īnd that’s just to name the famous ones. Tony Ellis, who played with Bill Monroe, studied engineering between musical pursuits. Ben Eldridge, of the once hugely popular bluegrass band “Seldom Scene,” develops signal-processing algorithms for the Navy’s underwater acoustics programs today. Noam Pikelny, whose instrumental banjo album was recently nominated for a Grammy, studied engineering at the University of Illinois. In fact, a strikingly large percentage of bluegrass banjo players are engineers, tinkerers, mathematicians, and programmers. The truth is somewhere on the other end of the backward/advanced spectrum.

#Banjo images movie

(The image persists, thanks, largely, to a five-minute scene in the movie Deliverance, reviled by banjoists everywhere.) Never mind the fact that all the early bluegrass banjo players wore suits and ties on stage. And yet, however much polish this recent uptick in popularity has lent the banjo, it’s not yet shed its reputation as a hillbilly instrument that belongs in the hands of an old-time farmer rather than a rock star. So does Winston Marshall from the group “Mumford and Sons,” and even Taylor Swift, kind of (it’s a six-string).