Clawhammer is one of the three main styles of banjo. Dixieland Banjo uses a four string tenor banjo and mostly a strumming of chords. There is Scruggs style which uses a five string banjo and the thumb picks down while the fingers pick up and is usually played in a roll pattern. This is the style of picking you hear in traditional bluegrass songs like Rocky Top, Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and the faster section of Dueling Banjos. Clawhammer banjo also uses a five string banjo but a different picking style all together. Both the thumb and fingers only play down strokes. Variations on clawhammer depend on whether the thumb or figners are playing the melody notes and whether a high drone note is incorporated. You can actually see a pretty good example from a song Steve Martin included in his act in the 70′s.
Clawhammer guitar is just an adaptation of the banjo picking style. You would normally play it in an open tuning and it’s played with an aggressive and loud approach. You can read more about it in this really good post. I say all of this to set up the video below of clawhammer guitar that I stumbled across. The guitarist is Bruno Esposito who plays as the Lone Wolf One Man Band (Facebook or Reverb Nation). I just love the sound of this. It has an old timey style to it mixed with rockabilly tempo.
Roger Hurricane Wilson has a new lesson available that will teach you a beginner blues shuffle. We’ll use power chords to play a 1-4-5 progression of E, A, and B. Roger will walk you through a variety of different rhythms and tempos you can use to play this and simulate several blues styles. We’ll also learn an intermediate level turnaround lick to play at the end of the progression. This lesson can be played on an acoustic or electric guitar. To get the tab check out the lesson page.
Jody has created a new blues guitar solo video for Youtube. He improvised a solo over a jam track of “Third Degree” and then went back and tabbed the whole thing out. Which is kind of insane once you see how intense the solo gets. Take a look for yourself and then take a stab at playing it.
Jody Worrell’s newest two lessons will teach you to play guitar solos for Crosscut Saw. This blues standard was brought to fame in 1964 by Albert King. It has a rumba beat that distinguishes itself from a lot of other blues classics. Below you will find a video featuring the audio from Albert’s studio version of the song. I’ve also included a video of Eric Clapton performing a pretty faithful cover of the song live.
So let’s say that instead of using letters to define notes, you assigned a number to represent each degree of a scale. Then you used that method to play Pi or π to 31 decimal places at 157 bpm. Then made the song a round and used a piano, xylophone, organ, accordian, ukulele, guitjo and other instruments. Well you probably wouldn’t do that, but someone else did and made an excellent video.
