I resisted alternate tunings on the banjo, and I kept my banjo in standard G for over a year before ever venturing to anything else. I played the guitar before I played the banjo. Like I said, I can easily relate to this resistance. For most, this is enough to overcome the drawbacks to not playing in multiple tunings.īut here’s one really important thing to remember: a banjo is not a guitar.Īnd while there are similarities in how you approach the playing of the banjo and the guitar, there are also some really fundamental differences, which we’ll explore in a sec. And the primary advantage of playing out of one tuning is only having to learn one set of tuning-specific chord formations. As such, the typical approach to learning the guitar is to start by learning the chords.Īnd learning chords for the first time – both where they’re located and how to get your fingers into all those awkward positions, is a major pain in the rear.Īnd people tend to want to avoid things that are major pains in the rear! Being able to play the primary chords on the guitar is a major learning milestone, and a process few people want to repeat!Īs mentioned, the main reason most guitar players only play out of one tuning is because the guitar, and the music most commonly played on it, is chord driven. It’s also worth noting that the resistance to alternate tunings most commonly comes from people with some prior experience playing the guitar, which is completely understandable. The guitar’s rise in popularity coincided with the rise in chord-driven music. That being said, in this day and age, most people who would ask the above question would probably consider standard G, or gDGBD, as the default tuning, as more often than not this is the one most banjo instruction begins with (an artifact of history, rather than an inherent property of the banjo). Which means you can tune your banjo strings to anything you want, and whatever tuning you end up with is no less “right” than anyone else’s tunings. There’s a range of notes each string can accommodate, creating an exceedingly large number of possible combinations. Sure, there are some tunings that may be preferred in certain styles or genres (standard G for bluegrass, for example, since that’s the one Earl Scruggs liked), but there isn’t any one tuning that’s inherently better for banjo playing than another.Īs with most things, and “rules” we concoct exist only in our shared imaginations. This alone may be part of the problem, as the truth is there really is no such thing as a standard tuning. The word alternate suggests that there’s a norm that’s being deviated from. In fact, many years ago, I said those same exact things.įirst of all, I should point out that the term that we use to describe the various tunings – “alternate” – implies that there’s some standard that you’re deviating from. Or to put it another way, why can’t I just learn all of my songs out of the same tuning?Īnd I get it. One of the most common questions that arises from beginning banjo players is: do I REALLY need to learn alternate tunings? In this article, you’ll learn why alternate tunings are used, why you should strongly consider using them if you’re a banjo player, why they shouldn’t be feared, and then how to approach using them according to what your goals are on the banjo.
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