When I started learning button accordion there were limited online resources available to help me out. Instead I went out and found a teacher. It was an unusual situation. I found a fellow who played piano accordion and piano and guitar but wasn’t exactly a button accordion player. Yet he had an idea about how to go about teaching it. We talked about it and agreed we didn’t know how well this was going to work but we could give it a try. John taught me a variety of music but I really wanted to learn how to play some of the traditional Portuguese tunes I had heard around the neighbourhood. We were living in a very Portuguese neighbourhood. John is an Italian fellow from Argentina who was teaching Portuguese kids how to play Portuguese folk music on an instrument he didn’t play. This was right up my alley. As it turned out, he was a perfect teacher for me. He gave me charts of the notes pushing and pulling air through the bellows and let me struggle learning them while at the same time I worked on improving my rudimentary reading skills. When I started into the Portuguese folk tunes, he would let me work on a tune for a while and then put on his piano accordion and say, we play it something like this, and he would play it through a few times so I could get the feel. I remember when I was learning to play a couple viras. Viras are like fast waltzes. In a way they are like the oberek, the Polish dance in which the dancers swirl in circles. Harder on the first beat, he’d say, harder, more, and I’d work on getting the feel right until my shoulder and  arm ached.  Another time, I was working on a tune I picked up from sheet music John provided. I thought I was doing really well with it. Again, John picked up the piano accordion and said, we do it more like this. I was playing it as a song and he played it as a fast dance tune. I wasn’t even close. It helped that I liked John a lot. I can’t imagine having a teacher who you don’t get along with personally. I haven’t seen John in ages. I hope he’s doing well.

When I started learning the banjo, back at the beginning of this year, it became clear very quickly there were a LOT of online resources available for the duffer banjo picker. It seemed like there were dozens of people shopping DVD teaching sets by publishing YouTube lessons free as teasers. I found those videos were helpful to me at the very start as I started learning to strike strings and do hammer-ons and pull-offs and slides and drop-thumbing and so on, but after a short while I mostly stopped watching them.

The other thing I learned quickly was that banjo pickers seemed to have dispensed with sheet music in the standard musical notation sense, replacing it with tabs that diagram what finger to do what with where. There are a lot of banjo tabs available – many of them free, and for a few bucks there are scads more available. Moreover, YouTube has performances at your fingertips of just about anything you can think of from the Old Time songbook, and many of those tunes are recorded by ordinary people (I mean that in the non-professional musician sense) recording in their living room with the video feature from their aim and shoot digital cameras. When I start learning a tune, I like to listen to a few different performances of it, and usually these are just a few clicks away. That is a fantastic learning tool.

One of the interesting things to me about clawhammer banjo and the Old Time songbook is that most people who play know most of the same tunes. Moreover, many of those tunes are often played in the same tunings. There are stylistic and regional differences of course but there is also a remarkable amount of consistency. I like to listen to a few versions if I can find them and that gives me a good idea of how the song feels or how it could feel. I find it really helpful to listen to a tune many times until I have the whole melody in my head.

Now it’s hard for me to imagine learning to play clawhammer banjo without consulting Youtube regularly. I’m going to end this post by sharing a nice version of a tune I’ve recently started to play, Grasshopper sitting on a sweet potato vine.