Hammer-ons, Pull-offs, and Slides

Somehow I have made it 20 years into playing tenor banjo without giving much consideration to the embellishments known as hammer-ons and pull-offs. I have kind of been doing slides, but not that much. This summer I am making it my goal to learn what hammer-ons and pull-offs are [they are fret-hand ornaments that help us play a note that is not picked] and practice implementing them in the Celtic and contra dance tunes that I like to play. 

My first question is why do these embellishments? I guess the answer is that hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides, as well as triplets and double stops, are stylistic tools that can be used as variations to help spice up a tune. It is also said that hammer-ons and pull-offs can create a smoother sound called legato.

I was looking for lessons on how to do hammer-ons and pull-offs in the context of fiddle tunes and found these posts by mandolin teachers Mando Mike and David Benedict. 

Mando Mike uses the well known tune Red Haired Boy to demonstrate where these embellishments can be inserted. https://www.mandomike.com/post/red-haired-boy-with-added-ho-po

David Benedict separates hammer-ons and pull-offs into two separate lessons:

https://youtu.be/wkxLn1OELtM?si=2jGcXTh2VvUm0454

https://youtu.be/W7xQdZ2H8N0?si=SeB-kNBgZsWDm-6r

I find slides to be a bit easier to "pull off". When I say slides, in this case I don't mean the Irish tune type called a slide, which is notated in 12/8 time. I mean the type of slide technique as taught in these videos by Mando Mike and David Benedict:

https://www.mandomike.com/post/after-the-battle-of-aughrim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apF1Up02HR4

I like the way BanjoLemonade does slides on the tenor guitar in this video: https://youtube.com/shorts/qR0iKNz1l7Y?si=QCxe5V4OSWZzP8dA

And that's it!

Featured Article: How To Learn Any Instrument Using Your Voice

Yesterday I came across an article from 2016 by Benedict Marsh titled "How to Learn Any Instrument Using Your Voice". It may be one of the best music learning posts I've ever come across. You can read the full write up here: https://www.lessonface.com/content/how-learn-any-instrument-using-your-voice

Here are some highlights:

Many people fail to realize that they have already learned how to play an instrument using mimicry once in their lives: their voice.

You learned to make all of those incredible sounds called words in your mother tongue by listening to the sounds around you and copying them through a lot of trial and error. The people around you didn’t show you a picture of the inside of your mouth and say, “put your tongue here”. It wasn’t taught visually. You just mimicked. 

The difference between the students who sing what they are trying to learn and those that don’t is blatant. When someone finally starts singing the part they are trying to play, they figure it out a lot faster. Singing the part connects you to your body, and to your aural abilities in a conscious physical way. It engages you in active listening - so that you are really paying attention to what the part is. You can’t sing a part unless you have really listened to it. This helps you to internalize it. If you have internalized it, it is much easier to bring that out of your body again into the instrument you are trying to learn.

Once I have mimicked my voice, by matching the notes on the guitar, I will notice that the way I am playing it on the guitar, assuming I am a beginner, doesn’t sound quite as fluid as the original. So, then I can start to practice it by singing small chunks of (an) 8 bar phrase and trying to get my guitar to sound the way I think it should sound to most accurately represent the (musical) phrase.

Take some time and connect to your voice. Go slow. Everyone can sing. Pick single notes on a piano or a guitar and try to find them with your voice. Let yourself “suck” and just try to match what you are hearing.

Trying to mimic the sound will change and grow your techniques! If you are playing something and it doesn’t sound like what you are trying to mimic - which you have now learned to sing - then change what you are doing until it does! Stay curious. You will discover new techniques this way; your own techniques.

Try to pick something that will challenge you but is doable for your skill level. It may be hard to navigate these waters at first, but you’ll get there.

Your ears telling you it doesn’t sound right is a good thing! It means you can hear the difference, and soon enough, with tenacity and determination, you will get it sounding the way you want it.

***

Is Tenor Banjo More Like Guitar, Mandolin or Banjo?

This post asks the question, is tenor banjo more like acoustic guitar, mandolin, or banjo? 

Mandolin

Some would say that tenor banjo is more like mandolin, primarily because of the tuning. If you already play tenor banjo tuned in 5ths, then it's easy to switch to either mandolin (or mandola) and vice versa. The similarity kind of stops there though. Mandolin has double course strings and a much shorter scale.

Guitar

The guitar is the instrument that replaced the banjo in jazz in the 1930's due improvements in design and amplification. The act of using a pick and flat-picking the way bluegrass guitar players do is quite similar to how Irish banjo players use a guitar pick to pluck melodies. Unless you tune your tenor banjo in Chicago style DGBE, then guitar is going to have a different tuning than tenor banjo. However, the scale length of a tenor banjo, especially a 19-fret/23-inch scale tenor banjo, is closer to that of a guitar than a mandolin. You're only a couple inches shy of a guitar scale length, whereas mandolin is about 9 inches shorter.

Banjo

From a playing perspective, tenor banjo actually shares very little in common with bluegrass style 5-string banjo playing or the old-time clawhammer banjo. There are similarities in construction. Both are banjos by design - a round frame with a skin or synthetic membrane stretched across it, with a neck and strings attached. And both share that lack of sustain. But the playing styles are very different.

In Summary

For decades I postponed getting an instrument and learning how to play it. One of the reasons is because I thought my options were only acoustic guitar, mandolin, or banjo, and I had excuses for why I didn't want to play each of those. Guitar felt too "boxy" and big. It had too many strings and was not comfortable to hold. Mandolin was cramped, too hard to get into tune, and I didn't like the feel of double course strings. Banjo, whether it bluegrass or clawhammer style (which were the only styles I knew of), just seemed like it would be too hard to play.

When I learned there was a banjo that you played with a guitar pick rather than your fingers or finger picks, tuned like a mandolin but with single strings an octave lower, and plucked single note melodies like a guitar flat-picker, I was sold. You take aspects of each...that unmistakable banjo sound, paired with the logic of an all 5ths tuning, and the tactile experience of plucking fiddle tunes so that you can pretend like you are Tony Rice or Norman Blake, all while playing a banjo. Not to mention that it's actually played in Irish music! Who knew?!

Trying to Sound Irish and Authentic

Fiddlers who play Irish tunes are oftentimes intentionally trying to sound Irish. Maybe you were a classically trained violinist or are coming from a bluegrass background, and now you're trying to get that other sound out of your playing and more of an Irish accent into your fiddling. 

I sometimes wonder if the same applies to Irish tenor banjo or if tenor banjo melody pluckers have more leeway? 

If you play basic versions of Irish tunes on tenor banjo, enough to get by in sessions, but you're not really adding typical banjo ornamentation like triplets, are you still playing Irish tenor banjo? 

Or let's say you do all the right things and have a 19-fret resonator tenor banjo tuned GDAE, play with a pick and make generous use of the characteristic triplets of Irish tenor banjo playing, but your repertoire focuses on American old-time, Québécois, and contra dance tunes instead of Irish trad. Are you still playing Irish tenor banjo? 

I also wonder where the line is between trying to sound authentic - as in trying to play with the ornamentation and other tropes that define "Irish" music, and trying to sound authentic - as in trying to sound like yourself even if that self happens to be an American who didn't grow up listening to Irish trad. 

Ultimately, the answer is probably to do whatever you want, as long as it sounds good to you. 

***

Creating Your Own Backing Tracks for Irish Trad Tunes

I've been looking for ways to create your own backing tracks with chords. I would be using these for the Irish tunes I'm learning. I like being able to play along with a chord-based backing track rather than just a drum beat. I found three options: Strum Machine, Musicca Chord Player, and TheMajor7. 

My criteria is:

-Must be quick and easy to use.

-Should have cool sounds like jazz, reggae, Latin, et cetera.

-Should have 6/8 and 9/8 time signatures that could work for Irish tunes.

-Should have a count-in option.

Of the three sites I found, Strum Machine checks the most of these boxes. It is the easiest to use, it has 6/8 and 9/8 Celtic time signatures, and a count-in option. The designer of it definitely has fiddle tunes in mind. Strum Machine also has cool features such as auto speedup (allows you to set it so that it increases by a certain BPM each time through the tune), auto finish (allows you to set the backing track to automatically stop after a certain number of times through the tune), and medley (allows to string multiple tunes together into an Irish session style set). Strum Machine is the one I'll be using the most. 

The only bad thing about Strum Machine is the sound options are limited and are primarily from a bluegrass perspective. This is probably fine for most users who play bluegrass, old-time or Irish trad, but I like pairing an Irish melody with a style that is outside the norm.

I wanted to test out Strum Machine's 9/8 Celtic slip-jig rhythm and its medley setting, so I created a medley of 2x through Redican's Mother and 2x through Hardiman the Fiddler. Here's how it turned out.

Musicca Chord Player is my second favorite so far. It's definitely coming from a pop music angle though. What Chord Player has going for it is it's fairly easy to use and it has a decent variety of style options. Plus I really like how when it changes to a different section it changes up the pattern. That adds a level of fun and excitement to the music. I'm probably in the minority when it comes to this, but I've been enjoying playing Irish reels to the Chord Player's reggae style(s).

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to turn on a count-in beat, which is strange. It starts right away when you click play so you either have to start in progress or wait for it to come around again. Chord Player will also just loop forever until you stop it. I didn't see a way for you to set it to only loop three times, for example. And you can't put together medleys like you can in Strum Machine. Chord Player also doesn't have 6/8 time, but you can mimic 6/8 time by doing 3 beats per measure and then doubling the overall number of measures.

Lastly there's TheMajor7.com. Although it takes a little longer to create the backing track than the other two (unless there are shortcuts I haven't learned), TheMajor7.com is probably the best for creating jazz style backing tracks. I didn't like TheMajor7's 6/8 time whatsoever, so I won't be using it for any jigs, but I will likely use it for playing tunes in 4/4 time. 

Here's an example of the Irish reel The Old Bush first played with a reggae backing band using Musicca Chord Player, followed by a jazz backing band from TheMajor7.com.

***

Twenty Years Playing Tenor Banjo

Next month, May 2026, will mark twenty years of playing tenor banjo. I went from having never played a musical instrument a day in my life to making it something I do every day. At first I was obsessed with the question of "how soon until I get good?". If I could have seen then where I am now I'm sure I would be unimpressed. I never got good. More like one-dimensionally adequate.

Fiddle tunes as well as Celtic jigs, reels, and hornpipes were pretty much there from the start because I had a couple teachers who helped steer me in that direction. For several years I also thought I should be playing songs by artists that I had spent most of my youth listening to including Ween, Phish, John Prine, Gillian Welch, The Grateful Dead, The Flaming Lips, Steve Earle, The Meat Puppets, Camper Van Beethoven, The Sadies, Neil Young, and more. 

It's funny how the idea of what music playing is going to be when you first start as an adult beginner changes over time. In my case I guess I grew out of the songs that I knew and loved when I was just a music fan and listener and grew into the instrumental tunes that more suited my chosen instrument - the tenor banjo flatpicked as a melody plucker.

One of the best things I ever did was I jumped right in. I didn't know of any jams or sessions where it was OK to mix tunes like Arkansas Traveler with tunes like Road to Lisdoonvarna, so I started my own! Within the first year or two, when I was still trying to figure out things like picking patterns and reading mandolin tab, I was hosting or co-hosting Fiddler's Fakebook type jams at local coffee shops including Java Jodi's in Goochland, VA and The Station Cafe and Ashland Coffee and Tea in Ashland, VA. Something I instantly liked about the tune playing community, whether it was old-time or more Irish trad based, is how welcoming the players could be to a beginner. I also caught a whiff of the snootiness that can be wrapped up in it through some attitudes and personality types. 

Ironically, the other best thing I ever did was to completely retreat from going to any jams or sessions whatsoever. From 2017 through 2023 I stopped playing anything that I had ever played before. During this time I stayed at home and pursued a solo practice where I would listen to musicians such as Tommy Guerrero, Sun Ra, Mulatu Astatke, Dorothy Ashby, Ernest Ranglin, Orchestra Baobab, The Skatalites, Blinky and the Roadmasters, Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band, Spokes Mashiyane, Lennie Hibbert, and Augustus Pablo (things that were far, far removed from being "fiddle tunes"), and then try and make up my own little AA/BB style tunes based on the melodies I was hearing in this music. Coincidentally this is almost exactly the same type of music that my now favorite radio station - KMHD in Portland, OR - plays 24/7 but I wouldn't discover KMHD until late 2025!

This approach did wonders for my ears and it also freed me from any concerns over right vs. wrong. Since I never once had access to the sheet music for the pieces I was using as inspiration, I never knew what the right notes were, or what the key signature was, or what the time signature was, or what the chords were, or where the measure lines went, or what BPM it should be played at, or even what type of tune it was. I wasn't thinking in terms of jig, reel, slide, rag, polka, slip-jig, march, hornpipe, mazurka, et cetera. I was meeting each melody head on in a case by case basis. 

Another thing I did during this time was I experimented with playing other instruments, including glockenspiel, xylophone, marimba, and guitar tuned in all-4ths. I still played all-melody all-the-time on these other instruments but it got me out of the finger patterns associated with GDAE all-5ths mandolin style tuning like I was using on the tenor banjo. Playing the keyboard layout of tuned mallet percussion was something completely different!

When I got to Oregon in 2024 and returned to the Irish trad repertoire with the goal of memorizing tunes and playing in sessions with others, I realized that I was now over whatever mental and physical humps had set me back in the past. Through a lot of hard work, I'm able to participate and be part of a community. I now learn Irish session tunes with the same method I was using with those other musical sources that I relied on from 2017 to 2023. My motto now is "learn the way it sounds and then make it sound the way you want". I no longer dwell over "how soon until I get good?". As an amateur, hobbyist, musician I get to play my instrument(s) every day and that's good enough for me.

***

A Two Octave Chromatic Marimba

In 2019 I got a 3 octave DeMorrow marimba. It was a great instrument at a fair price and I highly recommend it. These are considered student instruments because they have only 3 octaves instead of 4 or 5 and lack resonators, while offering a much better sound than a typical student level bells kit.

During this time period in my life I had retreated from going to Irish sessions or old-time jams and was staying at home making up my own little melodies. Marimba was great for this because it made me think about music in a different way. The chromatic keyboard layout with its black keys and white keys is so different from left-handed tenor banjo or mandolin tuned in 5ths or left-handed guitar tuned in 4ths.

Three octaves is considered small in size for marimba, however, it was still pretty huge when compared to a tenor banjo or mandolin. It was over four and a half feet wide! I played it for about a year and a half before selling it. I don't recall exactly why I opted to get rid of it but I'm impulsively fickle like that. It was probably because of space considerations.

I'm now considering getting a marimba again, but this time I only want it to be two octaves - 25 chromatic notes from C to C in the soprano range so that the lowest note is middle C. That should make it about three feet wide. Much easier to transport and find space for. The layout would be similar to the image below. I like the symmetry of the two / three / two / three black keys pattern.

Two octave chromatic marimba

When I moved to Oregon in 2024 I went back to learning and playing Irish tunes. My current repertoire consists almost entirely of tunes that are likely to be played at an Irish session, or what they call a Pan Celtic session. The payoff is that others are likely to know most anything I learn how to play. Since I am near Portland, there is a lot of crossover between the traditional Irish trad repertoire and the contra dance melodies as found in the Portland Collection books, which I love. 

By my estimate, at least 80% of the tunes played at an Irish session do not have a melody note lower than D. Maybe 90%. In other words, most of these tunes don't require the low G string of a violin to play them. And on the high end, only like 1% of the commonly played tunes have a note higher than B. This means that most of these tunes would fit in a two octave range from C4 to C6. 

I have a theory about why the Irish session repertoire is limited to this range. I think it's because these aren't "fiddle tunes", per se. Other instruments such as flute, D-whistle and uillean pipes have equal footing in the community, and on those instruments the lowest note is D. And on fiddle the highest note you can hit without leaving first position is the E-string B note that fiddlers play with their pinky. These tunes have evolved over the years to fit within that span.

On the rare occasion that a traditional Irish melody ventures down to a violin's G string, flute and whistle players use a technique called "folding" where they rearrange the portion that is too low for their instrument by playing in a higher octave. From what I understand, how much of it you fold up is determined on a case by case, player by player, basis. Sometimes it might just a note or two and other times entire phrases are moved to the higher octave. On occasion they may also use a harmony note like a third interval if that sounds OK. Failing that, perhaps you just sit that one out or play it on a banjo or mandolin.

A marimba would usually be 4.3 to 5 octaves. This allows marimbists such as Jenny Klukken to play low end notes and enjoy the full spectrum of sound that the marimba is designed for. In my case, I don't play with any sense of chords or harmony and I'm not playing music meant for marimba. I only play melodies. The fact that this folding technique exists for certain instruments in the Irish trad world gives me confidence that the same strategy could be applied to a two octave marimba.

I've tried some other instruments but none of them have worked. I got a melodica in October and quickly developed a lingering cough from inhaling some type of dust or bacteria from the tube that you use to blow air to make sound. F-that. I very briefly tried an English Concertina but I felt like that was going to give me wrist problems. None of these offered the same satisfaction of hitting a tuned percussion note with a mallet!

I probably won't be learning many reels on marimba. But jigs, slides, polkas, barn dances, and mazurkas are fair game, as well as slower airs and harp tunes.

To sum up, like I alluded to before, a marimba or xylophone can be a great second instrument for a string player because it takes you out of your comfort zone. Perfect for ear training and music theory - seeing and hearing things in a different way!