Is 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.
- Short answer
- Easier to start than most trad instruments, harder than average to play well
- Time to your first tune
- A week or two, played slowly
- Time to a slow session
- Six months to a year of regular practice
- What makes it hard
- The picking hand, not the fretting hand
- Hardest single thing
- The triplet
- Tunes you need for a beginner session
- About ten
What makes the tenor banjo easier than it looks?
Four strings, tuned GDAE, and that tuning does a lot of work. It is the same as a fiddle and a mandolin, so the tunes sit under your fingers exactly as fiddle players play them, and roughly 96% of the notes in the old collections fall within the first five frets. You are not moving up and down the neck.
The GDAE tuning is usually credited to Barney McKenna of The Dubliners, and it is the reason the instrument works for this music at all. Before it, tenor banjos were tuned CGDA and used for strumming rather than melody.
There are no chords to learn to get started. Irish traditional music is melody played in unison, so a beginner plays the tune and nothing else. That removes the entire barrier that stops people on guitar.
And the frets do the intonation for you. A fiddle beginner spends months getting notes in tune. On a banjo the note is either right or you are on the wrong fret.
What is actually hard about the tenor banjo?
The picking hand. Everything difficult about this instrument lives in the right hand, and it stays difficult long after the left hand has stopped being a problem.
The plectrum has to keep moving at speed while the accents land in the right places. A reel at a session runs 50 to 62 bars per minute, which is eight notes to the bar and no pause anywhere. The common beginner fault is rushing at the end of a phrase, because the picking hand stops moving through the long notes and then has to catch up.
Then there is the triplet, and it is the thing everyone gets stuck on. It is the defining ornament of Irish banjo playing and it is three notes played in the space of one, down-up-down, before you drop straight back into the pattern you were already in. Every teacher who writes about it says the same thing: the answer is relaxation. As one player puts it, tension is the killer, and the fearful anticipation of the triplet is itself a big tension inducer.
The other real difficulty is that a banjo note dies almost immediately. A fiddler can lean on a long note and shape it. You cannot. Anything slow and expressive, a slow air especially, is genuinely hard on this instrument, and most banjo courses skip airs entirely.
Tension is the killer, and the fearful anticipation of the treble is a big tension inducer.
How long does it take to learn the tenor banjo?
A first simple tune, played slowly and recognisably: a week or two. A polka like Maggie in the Woods has a narrow range, no accidentals and two-bar phrases that repeat, which is why it opens more than one published beginner course.
Playing along at a slow session: six months to a year of regular practice, and the limit is usually repertoire rather than technique. One teaching estimate puts it at around ten tunes for a beginner session, fifty for an intermediate one, and anywhere from a hundred to five hundred for an advanced session.
Clean triplets at full speed: years, and people who have played for a decade still work on them. This is the part nobody says out loud in an advert for a course.
What tunes should a beginner learn first?
Start slow and in 2/4 or 6/8. The published beginner curricula open on polkas, because they have fewer notes than anything else in the tradition and they are slow enough that you can think while you play. Then a jig, because 6/8 feels alien if you leave it too long and almost everyone arrives with years of 4/4 behind them.
Then a hornpipe before a reel. A hornpipe is slow enough that you can hear your own mistakes, which is exactly what you want at the point where your mistakes are the lesson. Reels last, because a reel gives you eight notes to the bar and no pause anywhere.
Five to start with, all of them on this site with the tab already written and playback you can slow down to 20%.
| Tune | Type | Key | Why this one |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Rakes of Mallow | Polka-ish, 2/4 | G | Short, repetitive, and about as gentle an entry as the tradition has |
| Off She Goes | Jig | D | Your first 6/8. Narrow range and heavy repetition |
| Out on the Ocean | Jig | G | On more published session lists than most, and it repeats itself constantly |
| The Boys of Bluehill | Hornpipe | D | The tune the forums name for a first hornpipe, and slow enough to hear yourself |
| Drowsy Maggie | Reel | Em | A first reel that stays in one hand position almost throughout |
What does the first year actually feel like?
It gets harder before it gets better, and the dip lands between months three and six. The timings below are the sourced ones from further up this page. The shape between them is what players describe rather than anything anybody has measured, and it is set out here because the third stage is where most people quit and almost nobody warns you about it.
- Weeks 1 to 2A tune arrives almost immediately
The frets put every note in tune for you and there are no chords to learn, so a simple tune played slowly is a fortnight's work. This part is genuinely as encouraging as it looks on YouTube.
- Months 1 to 3Tunes start stacking up
Because roughly 96% of the notes in the old collections sit in the first five frets, each new tune reuses the shapes of the last one. Five tunes becomes fifteen faster than you expect.
- Months 3 to 6The wall, and it is the right hand
Everything you play comes out at the same speed and the same volume, triplets sound like mistakes, and speeding up makes it fall apart. This is the point people conclude they have no talent. What has actually happened is that the fretting hand has run ahead of the picking hand, and the picking hand is the part that takes years.
- Months 6 to 12A slow session becomes possible
Six months to a year of regular practice, and the limit is repertoire rather than technique: about ten tunes gets you into a beginner session. Playing with other people is also the fastest cure for the wall, because you cannot rush when everyone else is holding the tempo.
- Year two and afterWhere the progress actually comes from
Not from new tunes. From slowing old ones down. The habit that separates players who improve from players who plateau is finding the fastest speed at which you make no mistakes at all, sitting there until it is dull, and only then moving up. Clean triplets at full speed take years, and people who have played for a decade still work on them.
What do you need to buy to get started?
A 17-fret or 19-fret tenor banjo. The difference that matters is scale length rather than fret count: a 17-fret instrument runs roughly 50.5 to 54.5cm and a 19-fret runs 55.5 to 58.5cm. A shorter scale suits smaller hands and lets you cover two frets with one finger the way a mandolin player does. The 19-fret is the standard and it is louder and brighter, but it asks for a bigger stretch.
A thin pick, and this surprises people coming from guitar or mandolin. Enda Scahill uses 0.7mm, Tony O'Rourke uses a 0.5mm Tortex and says a thicker pick offers too much resistance, particularly through triplets. Mandolin players run 1.15mm to 1.5mm. If you are fighting your pick, it is probably too heavy.
Strings gauged for GDAE at your scale length, not standard CGDA strings. Going from CGDA to GDAE raises every string, so the wrong set will feel tight and may snap.
Questions about learning the tenor banjo
The things people ask before they commit to an answer.
Easier to begin and harder to master. There are no chord shapes to learn, so you can play a recognisable tune within a fortnight, which takes most guitar beginners longer. What takes years on banjo is the picking hand: speed, accents and the triplet.
To start with, considerably. The frets put every note in tune for you, which removes the months a fiddle beginner spends on intonation, and there is no bow arm. The tradeoff comes later, because a banjo note dies quickly and cannot be shaped the way a bowed note can.
Six months to a year of regular practice for a slow session, and the limiting factor is usually how many tunes you know rather than technique. Around ten tunes is enough to take part in a beginner session. A regular session expects considerably more.
No. Most Irish traditional players learn by ear and many read nothing at all. Tablature is the middle ground: it shows you which fret on which string without asking you to read standard notation, and every tune on this site has it already written out.
The triplet. It is three notes in the space of one, picked down-up-down, and then straight back into the pattern. Every teacher gives the same advice, which is that it comes from relaxation rather than effort. Tension makes it worse and anticipating it makes you tense.
You can get a long way alone with recordings and tab, and plenty of players have. A teacher is worth most for the picking hand, because that is the part you cannot see yourself doing wrong and the part where bad habits set hardest.
There is no such age for this instrument. Irish traditional music has a strong culture of adult beginners, and the physical demands are modest compared with most instruments.
An Irish tenor banjo is a 4-string banjo, but not every 4-string banjo suits this music. Plectrum banjos have a longer neck and different tuning. What you want is a tenor banjo, 17 or 19 frets, tuned GDAE.
Keep reading
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 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.