Guides
The questions people actually ask, answered properly and with the sources named.
10 guides
The 20 tunes you'll actually hear at a session
Every session has its own repertoire, but a core of tunes turns up night after night, in Ireland and everywhere the music travels. Here are twenty of them, grouped by type, with free GDAE tab for each. Ten of these played steadily is enough to take part.
Read the guideIs the Irish tenor banjo hard to learn?
Easier than the fiddle, harder than it looks on YouTube. The notes come quickly and the right hand takes years. Here is an honest account of what is actually difficult, what is easier than people expect, and how long it takes to be useful at a session.
Read the guideHow fast should Irish tunes be played?
Almost every published tempo for Irish music is unusable, because the number is given without saying what one beat is. A reel and a hornpipe both listed at 113 are running at 56.5 and 28.3 bars per minute. Here are the figures with their units named.
Read the guideGDAE or CGDA? Which tuning for Irish tenor banjo
A tenor banjo bought second hand is almost always in CGDA, and almost every Irish player retunes it to GDAE. Here is why, what it does to the strings, and how to make the change without breaking anything.
Read the guideWhich pick for Irish tenor banjo and mandolin
Thinner than you expect, and much thinner than a mandolin pick. If you are fighting your plectrum through triplets, it is almost certainly too heavy. Here is what the named Irish teachers actually use.
Read the guidePicking patterns for reels, jigs and hornpipes
Reels are settled: alternate down-up throughout. Jigs are the one thing Irish banjo teachers openly disagree about, and nobody publishes a pattern for slip jigs at all. Here is what each named teacher actually says, with the argument laid out rather than a single answer invented.
Read the guideIs the banjo Irish?
No. The banjo is West African, and it reached Ireland in 1844 with a touring American blackface minstrel troupe. It took another hundred and twenty years to become the instrument you hear in a session. That is a better story than the one people expect.
Read the guideHow many strings does a banjo have?
Five, usually. Four if it is a tenor or a plectrum banjo, and six exists. For playing Irish tunes you want four. The two common banjos are built for different jobs and the fifth string is the reason, and The Dubliners carried one of each, which is the clearest answer anybody has given.
Read the guide17-fret or 19-fret tenor banjo?
Fret count is a label rather than a measurement, and two banjos both sold as 17-fret can differ by more than two inches of scale. The number that decides how the instrument feels and what strings it needs is the distance from nut to bridge. Here is what that distance actually changes, with the arithmetic.
Read the guideWhat to look for in a first tenor banjo
Most first banjos are chosen on price and spec, and most of the disappointment comes from setup and from the wrong strings. Here is what each price band actually buys, what to measure, and the two things worth more than an extra two hundred euro on the instrument.
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