Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Need some structure to practice

#1

Hey all -
I’ve been picking this thing for several years off and on and have been through multiple periods of growth and plateau, but still am not where I feel like I should be in skill level.
In most things I try to learn or improve, I generally do well with some structured learning, but have never really applied that to music, so I was hoping someone could recommend a general practice routine.
Let’s say I can commit 30 mins per day to focused practice (generally I can find additional opportunities to pick up the instrument and ‘play around’ with stuff).

Some of my short term goals are:

  1. Improve my ear for identifying keys and chord changes:
    Currently if I know what key a tune is in, I can usually figure out a I-IV-V progression, but if I need to learn to figure it out quicker, and if there’s any ‘other’ chords I have a lot of trouble figuring it out.
  2. Improve my sense of the beat.
    I can usually keep decent time by myself, or playing with a recording I’m familiar with, but if speed changes up or down from whatever I’ve practiced it throws me off. Even when I convince myself to use a metronome, once I start playing I really struggle to hear the clicks (same thing if I’m playing with a group and have a bass keeping the beat).
  3. Improve current tunes I know.
    I’ve got a pretty big repertoire I’ve learned mostly from tab, but I do find when I play some of them against recordings they don’t always sound ‘right’. Sometimes I’m missing a couple notes (and thus throwing myself out of time), and sometimes its just a dynamics issue where I’m playing the right lick, in time, but not emphasizing the right note.

I definitely need to start finding people to play with, and might have a lead on a local, semi-regular jam, but I would also love to be able to just turn on a bluegrass playlist on Spotify or something and pick along with it, but right now it usually takes me half the song just to figure out what key it is, then the other half to figure out the chord progression. Does anyone happen to know of a resource that might list a lot of ‘standards’ with references to available recordings and what key they are in?

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#2

It’s gonna sound self evident, but to reach your stated goals, I would do this exact thing. Put on a bluegrass playlist that you don’t control (radio, spotify, whatever). A song comes on, figure out the key, figure out what position you want to play it out of. Figure out the progression (if it isn’t an obvious one, I’d approach it like you would in a live situation… sparsely play until you get an idea of what you are doing). If you are absolutely stumped, look the key/progression up. Every little thing you figure out on the fly is a victory and the more you do it, the better you will get at it.
While you are doing this, you could break your 30 minutes down into 10 minute segments to focus on the 3 goals. First 10 minutes, focus on recognition. Second 10 minutes, focus on synching with tunes that aren’t familiar. Third 10 minutes, work on one song that you don’t know well or can’t play with others well.
Best of luck!

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