Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Discuss the Banjo lesson: Salt Creek- Intermediate

https://banjobenclark.com/lessons/salt-creek-intermediate-banjo

This is one of the first tunes I learned to pick, and it’s still one of the last ones I play before hitting the sack at night. This is a fairly straight ahead version that hammers right at the melody, while reaching up the neck a bit in the second half. You’re gonna play it in every jam you wade into, and this version will get you used to the water.

A) I had the exact same t-shirt for years.
B) Love the inlay.

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Here is my a part. I think my ring finger gets in the way of a crisp pulloff. And my callous on my middle pulloff finger lets the string snap like how do I post a video. Its saying too large its 90 MB

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Hey Ed, the best way is to upload your video to YouTube, then post the link here.

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Thanks, I’ll try that

https://studio.youtube.com/video/wQBJ-7P4HQE/edit Here is my first try at posting a video of my progress here in video land. This is before you gave me my wrist angle comment so I will work on that and get back Ben.

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Thanks! I think the link you posted is actually to your YouTube backend page that you uploaded the video from, so we can’t view it. If you can just view the video in the regular YouTube player like a viewer would and post that link, it’ll work.

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Hopefully this will work. I think this shows my bad wrist angle which affects my finger position https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQBJ-7P4HQE

We need to work on getting that F chord pull off cleaned up at the :10 mark. As you said, your ring finger is muting it. We’ll see if the wrist position helps it, but it may also be a positioning issue of the finger itself. We’ll get it!

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Thanks Ben, I think this will get me to the next plateau. I think I was trying to squeeze the neck and the strings and to get my arm square with the neck, that caused my wrist to be bent back which makes my fingers not sit on the string correctly muting strings. But I have done it wrong so long it will take awhile. I keep looking at my wrist and it gets bent then I straiten it and continue on. As Ron Block says, build muscle memory, so it naturally sits in the correct attitude and makes it easier to play. I also think I was trying to press too hard on the strings. Its slowly getting better. That particular pulloff is hard but getting so it sounds better. I will send you more video soon as now I know how to post stuff. Happy Cabin Camp, I will make one next year. Maybe Montana as part of a summer vacation trip.

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