Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Turkey in the Straw

:confused: I have been plugging away at the tab for awhile. I haven’t learned all of the tab yet, but close. When I get to measures 30 and 31 I can’t seem to get the right emphasis on the right notes. It just sounds like some random notes, way too mechanical when I try. Which notes should get more emphasis in those measures. By the way, I don’t play it quite as fast as the video. Maybe that makes a difference.

Howdy,
I haven’t worked on that one yet, but I took a look at the measures around 30 and 31. To my ear, I am not sure it’s a matter of emphasis as much as a matter of swinging the 1/8th notes. If I play it as straight eighths, it sounds odd slow, but if I swing the the eighths, it sounds fine. If I were going to accent anything, I might accent the off beats (3 7 2 5 0 3 2 0, etc.). That’s kind of the cool thing… others might accent other notes and make it sound different and great. I just went and listened to Ben playing it at speed and it sounds pretty evenly accented. He is swinging the eighths a bit. He is also playing it much smoother than I can :slight_smile:

Many of these phrases in bluegrass don’t sound right until they get up a bit closer to speed. One thing that is a real help to me is to use Tabledit to slow down the playback to get the phrasing and syncopation correct at slower speeds.

— Begin quote from "mreisz"

Howdy,
I haven’t worked on that one yet, but I took a look at the measures around 30 and 31. To my ear, I am not sure it’s a matter of emphasis as much as a matter of swinging the 1/8th notes. If I play it as straight eighths, it sounds odd slow, but if I swing the the eighths, it sounds fine. If I were going to accent anything, I might accent the off beats (3 7 2 5 0 3 2 0, etc.). That’s kind of the cool thing… others might accent other notes and make it sound different and great. I just went and listened to Ben playing it at speed and it sounds pretty evenly accented. He is swinging the eighths a bit. He is also playing it much smoother than I can :slight_smile:

Many of these phrases in bluegrass don’t sound right until they get up a bit closer to speed. One thing that is a real help to me is to use Tabledit to slow down the playback to get the phrasing and syncopation correct at slower speeds.

— End quote

Showing my inexperience and lack of musical knowledge, but by “swing” do you mean sort of cheating on the timing of the notes so that some notes get a tad more time and others a tad less?

That’s exactly right. Typically, the up beats get a little bit later the more you swing a note. The down beats get a little more time and the up beats a little less. Highly swung eighths sound like the first and last notes of a triplet with the middle note omitted. It makes the notes kind of shuffle. I am trying to thing of an exaggerated example and Elvis’ “Blue Christmas” comes to mind (also a blues shuffle works if that is familiar). The tef file (that you can use with Tabledit) has the swing included so you can hear it even when it is slowed down. One can also adjust the amount of swing in the “syncopation” control of the Midi options dialog. Maybe one of the best ways to understand the swinging eighths is to play with that setting during playback. A setting of 0 is straight eighths and a setting of 1 is a little swung (they call it “jazz eighths”), and a setting of 2 is “swing eighths.” The way Ben set the tef was for 1, “jazz eighths.”

I don’t remember where he explains it, but Ben does explain swinging eighths in a few videos. I just did a quick youtube search and there are multiple examples of swinging eighths. Here’s one:
youtube.com/watch?v=oLzYw9hcQFQ