Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Worried Man Blues

Anyone have a guitar melody tab for worried man blues? I found the rhythm off one of my old banjo tabs but havent found a decent guitar one yet. Or maybe I will get lucky and Ben will do this old classic as a good beginner jam tune, wink wink

Alright since I tinkered around with tabledit and created that “she’ll be coming around the mountain” tef on the other topic I figured I would take a stab at this one tonight.

I got the basic melody out of a bluegrass picker’s tunebook that has a bunch of songs in it with the words and basically copied the notation from that book into tabledit and then it created the guitar melody for me. then I threw in what I thought would be the rhythm and bass parts for it.

Let me know what ya all think and see if maybe we can work this one up a bit :wink:

This is one of my absolute favorites so I would love to be able to play this one in my jam!

I had a few minutes to write an alternate bass part that might give you some ideas.

One thing I’d point out is notice in measure 8 that I played the C note twice. The reason is that bass is usually played 1-V-1-V

Well, The V note of the Iv chord © is a G note. If I play the second note of that measure as a G it gives a strange sound like the bass switched chords a half measure early. If you listen hard to recordings you will findd many pro Bass players will simply repeat the root note of the IV chord before going to the I.

The same rule holds true on the last measure of the I chord (G in this case) when going to the V chord (D).

another way to fix this problem is to create a run that leads form one chord to the next (which I did going to the D in this case.

— Begin quote from "bmorgan42175"

I got the basic melody out of a bluegrass picker’s tunebook that has a bunch of songs in it with the words and basically copied the notation from that book into tabledit and then it created the guitar melody for me.

— End quote

I use this idea all the time. If I don’t own a book with the melody in it, I can usually find at least a sample portion of the sheet music for free online. Once I’ve loaded it into Tabledit I start tinkering with it and looking for places to use some of those Banjo Ben licks I’ve picked up.

Awesome Dave!

I was hoping you would chime in and rewrite that bass part for me. That’s exactly what it needed, a bass player to write it as a bass player I am not, that was merely a guess on my part.

Hopefully we can get some others here to chime in on the other parts and throw together on the other parts what they know and what we have all learned from Ben.

This is really cool. Technology sure is great. And I never heard that song before and I like it.

I listen to this song about 2 times a day at a minimum. I also sing it every week at my jam. I loves me some Stanley Brothers!

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4lr7YIMVH4[/video]