Your current opinion of the banjo might be one of two polar opposites; it might be that you consider the banjo to be that instrument from The Beverly Hillbillies or Deliverance, the clown of instruments, a joke of a stage prop.

The other opinion, and the one which I’m here to advocate, is the banjo as the ultimate hacker’s instrument: an instrument built for optimisation, combining the most technical of prowess with beautiful expression, and a melancholic instrument with a hint of a smile on the corner of its lips.

I’m just an amateur musician, part-time musician if I’m in the mood to give myself a bit more credit. My day job is that of a programmer, and as a programmer with real interest in my field I might also – on a good day – call myself a hacker. Not the black hat, bank-breaking, pentagon-penetrating type, mind you, just a person who enjoys solving problems with code – in sometimes creative ways.

The parallels between hacking and playing the banjo is many, and might explain my love for this quirky instrument.

Built for speed

The banjo is a highly optimised instrument in a lot of different ways. And isn’t there something about the ultimate optimisation that just stirs your hacker heart? Hacking might seem like it’s about taking shortcuts, but I like to think of it as finding the most efficient path to a goal. Shortcuts imply lazyness, wheras efficiency takes real work – sometimes even more work.

In the banjo, this is manifested in how it’s built. When you pick up a guitar, it has a certain warmth to it. Not so with a modern 5-string banjo. It is firm, unforgiving, and damn heavy. Machine-like, if you will. There’s no give whatsoever, and rather than warm wood, the parts you touch are mostly metal or plastic.

Start picking at the strings and you’ll be surprised at how loud it is. The strings ring out almost just by touching them. That’s because they’re sitting, by way of a wooden bridge, on a drum skin stretched across a hollow resonator. The drum skin is much better at transmitting and amplifying the vibrations from the string than the wooden top of a guitar. How is this linked to speed? Well, like a true 80s super compressed shred guitar, the less you have to move your picking hand the faster you can use it.

The resonance of the strings and drum head is further enhanced by what’s called a tone ring, the heavy metal ring that the drum skin is tensioned onto and gives the banjo its characteristic ringing (I hesitate to say piercing) sound.

A 5-string banjo has another characteristic that literally sticks out like a wart. The fifth string only reaches a bit over half way up the neck, terminating in a distinct lonely tuning peg. This drone string is the brightest string on the banjo, completely out of order with the other strings and compared to most other stringed instruments. It is, however, crucial for some playing styles that have developed – perhaps the most oft-heard of which is the Scruggs style, named after the great Earl Scruggs.

Another optimisation point of the banjo is the low string height, called action, made possible by the impressive natural amplification of the instrument so you don’t have to pick as hard.

Economical playing style

When you get into learning the banjo, you’ll be practicing a lot of rolls. Rolls are picking patterns with your right hand. I’m generalising here because there are a lot of ways of playing a banjo but as before I’ll focus on the Scruggs style. Earl Scruggs played his banjo using three fingers: thumb, index and middle. The most common rolls consists of eight eight-notes. Rolls are what you hear the most clearly when a banjo is backing another instrument, but as you’ll see they’re crucial to playing the banjo at all.

I’ll be blunt and get this out of the way: praticing rolls bores me to no end.

Hackers have no patience for repetition. That’s the reason we hack in the first place, to automate what can be automated and get rid of what can’t. Still, practicing these rolls is key to what the banjo is all about: efficiency. Having rolls in your muscle memory and being able to play them fast, chop them up, turn them around, alternate between them and change the strings on which they’re played, is exactly what gives banjo players their impressive speed. Sometimes you’ll hear the banjo played at what seems like impossibly fast speeds.

Don’t get me wrong, it takes real skill to play that fast but there really is a trick to it, through the weirdly ordered fifth strings and these rolls. I wish I could give you good examples of this but I’m not sure they would make much sense without having struggled with the banjo for a while. Sure, you’ll say, that looks like a good way to play a riff, but you won’t really appreciate that line for what it is without having tried to play it in a million wrong ways first!

Banjo solos too, fast and slow ones, rely on rolls to move around fluently and efficiently. Rolls is the programming language and building blocks of the banjo. The better you know them the more you’ll be able to put them to artistic, or in the case of programming sometimes poetic, use. Rolls are ultimately about finding the best way to play a melody with the least amount of effort for your fingers. Playing the same tone many times after each other with the same finger is not very fast at all. Rolls is a trick that finds the most elegant solution to that problem.

The banjo is, as programming, part hard skills, part creativity. Any instrument is, I suppose but the hard skills and reliance on patterns is greater with the banjo than any other instrument I’ve played.

Open source

Another parallel I’d like to draw is one between free software and folk music. Folk songs are still being taught and passed down from generation to generation, on the internet or in person. Traditional music is in our common pool of knowledge and aren’t really owned by anyone.

This isn’t unique to the banjo, but the banjo is still closer to traditional music than a few other instruments and free access to a huge library of still relevant music is a great appeal when you start learning an instrument.

Banjo playlist

I thought I’d leave off listing a few of my favourite tracks featuring a banjo, to get you started on the road to loving this beautiful instrument.

Béla Fleck – Buffalo Nickel from The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales From The Acoustic Planet Vol. 2

Amazon

It’s hard to pick the best track from this album, and if you’re into hifi sound I highly recommend the DVD Audio version of this album. Incredible sound on a pair of headphones.

I picked Buffalo Nickel in the end because it has a nice traditional beat and a gorgeous melody.

Punch Brothers – It’ll Happen from Punch

Amazon

Beautifully melancholic and still hopeful song with the banjo in a mostly accompanying role. Really shows off the tone of the banjo in a more quiet setting.

Dave Matthews Band – Spoon from Before These Crowded Streets

Amazon

This is again the great Béla Fleck (noticing a pattern?), playing a solo that struck my ear the very first time I heard it and is part of the reason I started playing the banjo in the first place (my first instrument is the guitar). The haunting banjo solo starting at around 2:35 is the link between a duet starting with Dave Matthews and leading perfectly into the ever beautiful voice of Alanis Morissette on the next verse.

Notice the fluency of Fleck’s solo, a legato quality even if he’s really using the rolls I talked about earlier, each note is on a different string than the previous one.

Steve Martin – The Crow from Crow: New Songs for the Five String Banjo

Amazon

Steve Martin has a rather sharp tone to his banjo, giving it an immediacy in the mix of this tune. I love the banjo duet, a testament to the timing skills so important on a banjo.

This song is also a good example of the role a banjo often has in bluegrass music. With just three fingers you’re encouraged to keep your chords to the essential notes, leaving much up to the bassist to decide what root note to lay down – potentially changing the role of your chord completely. Fantastically open. Youtube has a cool live version of this song featuring Steve Martin, Tony Trischka and Béla Fleck.

Finally, my favourite banjo track of all time, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones playing Big Country. Here from a live rendition from the DVD Live at the Quick. Extra points for the untraditional, downtuned Nechville Meteor Electric Banjo.