Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Will the Circle Be Unbroken Banjo Contest!

Mark,
That was the best music video I have seen in a LONG time…and I truly mean that!:grin: How in the world did you get away with playin banjo and shooting a video in a cemetery. Awesome pickin, your very talented!

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Aroth,
Excellent picking and excellent machine shop!

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That was great @lcourtney.

Alam Munde has a great Workout DVD that would help bring your pinky into play. It’s a tough group of finger exercises a bit like a military boot camp, that’s designed to help your dexterity, stretch and organise your fingerings. I had problems stretching my pinky and It helped me a lot.

If your interested to learn more you will find it at the bottom of this page.

http://almundesbanjocollege.com/dvds/

Hi Butch

How many microphones are you using? Sounds like you have an audio conflict often caused by the mike in the video cam.

Great job Annette

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This has been really awesome to watch all the effort being put into this contest. Good job on all the entries. We should all keep working at the solos and post a follow up video in a few weeks to show the progress we’ve made.

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Thanks Brandon! My wife thought we should get permission, but I went in with the idea “ ‘tis easier to get forgiveness than permission.”

I have a lot of family in that cemetery, and my grandparents (who are all buried there) knew the owners. So I had a backup plan if we got busted. :slight_smile:

Nice job on your entry, too. It was clean for the most part, but to me, you came through on the most important part… recovering after a mistake. I believe that’s one of the reasons Ben wants us to play along with his backing tracks. At some point, we’ll likely be playing with other musicians. You showed you can play clean and quickly get back on track if your fingers don’t cooperate for a second.

That’s at least as important as a clean entry. Well done!

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Thanks Mark. That is one area I have really improved in over the last two years. Before joining as a gold pick member I had never played with a jam track. I do better now when I get the chance to play with others.

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Hey Archie, just using one microphone, its built in. I see where other players use headsets. Wish I knew more bout those tech components. And are you guys reading tab at the same time? I’m just not sure how to put it all together. :confused: Playing with the tef files is so much easier than rhythm tracks, to me anyways. But that didn’t work out either.

Good job on ALL the wonderful entries and I’m a proud teacher! I’ll announce the 3 winners on facebook live at noon central, then also post here. More of these contests to come soon!

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Thanks!

Congrats to 1st place winner (by random drawing): @cflauge! You win a BlueChip thumbpick of your choice, strings, and more!

The next 2 winners by drawing are: @Wendell and @dougfish! Y’all get strings and some more goodies!

I’ll be emailing the winners soon, along with a couple other surprise winners for their submissions!

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Congrats all!

Congrats everyone! This was a fun contest. I’m really impressed by all of the entries.

Hi Butch

It might help to resolve your audio problem by using an external mike and disabling the build in mike. I am no expert it was trial and error plus asking lots of tech questions on the BHO

I too was surprised to see headphones in use especially with the audio track and banjo clearly audible…

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Headphones are used to improve the quality of the final product. You can import Ben’s backing track into a multi-track recorder like GarageBand, play that track in your headphones while recording your banjo part, then blend the volume of the 2 tracks so they sound good together.

The real benefit is that there’s almost no quality loss of Ben’s backing track.

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Well done Y’all really great to see so many new faces posting such great videos.

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Hi Mark I’d love to know more, perhaps you could do a video tutorial to explain the process.

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Seriously great job on this! Doing great for 6 months.

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Thanks Archie. Someone also suggested updating the drivers so I learned how to do that this morning. Hopefully my next attempt will work out better.

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