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The Keith style of playing the 5-string banjo emphasizes the melody of the song. Also known as the "Melodic" or "Chromatic style", it was first developed and popularized independently by Bobby Thompson and Bill Keith in the early 1960s. It is used primarily by bluegrass banjoists, though it can be applied to virtually any genre. Most banjoists who play Keith style do not use it exclusively, but integrate it as one aspect of their playing, a way of adding spice to the more common 3-finger style of Earl Scruggs.
The banjo is a four-, five-, or six-stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity as a resonator, called the head, which is typically circular. The membrane is typically made of plastic, although animal skin is still occasionally used. Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by Africans in the United States, adapted from African instruments of similar design. The banjo is frequently associated with folk, Irish traditional, and country music. Banjo can also be used in some Rock Songs. Countless Rock bands, such as The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and The Allman Brothers, have used the five-string banjo in some of their songs. Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in African-American traditional music and the folk culture of rural whites before entering the mainstream via the minstrel shows of the 19th century. The banjo, along with the fiddle, is a mainstay of American old-time music. It is also very frequently used in traditional ("trad") jazz.
William Bradford "Bill" Keith was a five-string banjoist who made a significant contribution to the stylistic development of the instrument. In the 1960s he introduced a variation on the popular "Scruggs style" of banjo playing which would soon become known as melodic style, or "Keith style".
Bluegrass music is a genre of American roots music that developed in the 1940s in the United States Appalachian region. The genre derives its name from the band Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. Bluegrass has roots in traditional English, Irish, and Scottish ballads and dance tunes, and by traditional African-American blues and jazz. The Blue Grass Boys played a Mountain Music style that Bill learned in Asheville, North Carolina from bands like Wade Mainer's and other popular acts on radio station WWNC. It was further developed by musicians who played with him, including 5-string banjo player Earl Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt. Bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe characterized the genre as: "Scottish bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin'. It's Methodist and Holiness and Baptist. It's blues and jazz, and it has a high lonesome sound."
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The Keith style is a fingerpicking style played with picks on the thumb, index and middle fingers. It centers on playing scales in a linear fashion. This contrasts with "3-Finger" or Scruggs style, which is centered on arpeggios, or chord tones played in rapid succession. Generally speaking, in the Keith style the fingers of the picking hand alternate between strings, rarely picking the same string twice. Frequently open strings are alternated with strings that are fretted halfway up the neck or more. These aspects contrast with "Single String" or Reno style, which also emphasizes linear (playing the same string multiple times) playing. In Reno style, however, scales are played out of closed-chord positions, where the entire scale may be played without moving the fretting hand up or down the neck, by moving from the lowest to highest string in a linear fashion. In the Reno style, the index finger and thumb generally alternate while picking, and often pick the same string two or more times in succession. One aspect of Keith style which makes it difficult to learn is that one often moves to a higher note in the scale by picking a lower string, albeit fretted to give the higher note.
Scruggs style is the most common style of playing the banjo in bluegrass music. It is a fingerpicking method, also known as three-finger style. It is named after Earl Scruggs, whose innovative approach and technical mastery of the instrument have influenced generations of bluegrass banjoists ever since he was first recorded in 1946. It contrasts with earlier styles such as minstrel, classic or parlor style, clawhammer/frailing/two-finger style, jazz styles played with a plectrum, and more modern styles such as Keith/melodic/chromatic/arpa style, and single-string/Reno style. The influence of Scruggs is so pervasive that even bluegrass players such as Bill Keith and Don Reno, who are credited with developing these latter styles, typically work out of the Scruggs style much of the time.
Donald Wesley Reno was an American bluegrass and country musician best known as a banjo player in partnership with Red Smiley, and later with guitarist Bill Harrell.
A distinct advantage of melodic style is the ease of playing fiddle tunes using the melody verbatim while maintaining a right hand technique in line with Scruggs-style. Accomplishing the same goal in single string style often requires a different right hand approach. While at times the thumb may be used in a manner inconsistent with a banjo roll-based style, the "cascading" effect of the roll is still present in many examples of melodic style playing (especially with the bombastic descending runs, popular in the 1970s).
In bluegrass music, a banjo roll or roll is an accompaniment pattern played by the banjo that uses a repeating eighth-note arpeggio – a broken chord – that by subdividing the beat 'keeps time'. "Each ["standard"] roll pattern is a right hand fingering pattern, consisting of eight (eighth) notes, which can be played while holding any chord position with the left hand."
The earliest recordings of the melodic style were made by Bobby Thompson in the late 1950s when he was in Jim and Jesse's band. The style came to prominence when Bill Keith joined Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys in 1963. He impressed audiences with his ability to play fiddle tunes note-for-note on the banjo. Other early proponents were Marshall Brickman and Eric Weissberg. During the 1960s and '70s, the style steadily gained popularity among progressive bluegrass banjoists like Alan Munde, Tony Trischka, Courtney Johnson, Ben Eldridge and Gordon Stone. However, the style remains somewhat controversial among strict traditionalists.
William Smith Monroe was an American mandolinist, singer, and songwriter, who helped to create the style of music known as bluegrass. Because of this, he is commonly referred to as the "Father of Bluegrass".
A fiddle is a bowed string musical instrument, most often a violin. It is a colloquial term for the violin, used by players in all genres including classical music. Although violins and fiddles are essentially synonymous, the style of the music played may determine specific construction differences between fiddles and classical violins. For example, fiddles may optionally be set up with a bridge with a flatter arch to reduce the range of bow-arm motion needed for techniques such as the double shuffle, a form of bariolage involving rapid alternation between pairs of adjacent strings. To produce a "brighter" tone, compared to the deeper tones of gut or synthetic core strings, fiddlers often use steel strings. The fiddle is part of many traditional (folk) styles, which are typically aural traditions—taught 'by ear' rather than via written music. Fiddling refers to the act of playing the fiddle, and fiddlers are musicians that play it.
Marshall Brickman is an American screenwriter and director, best known for his collaborations with Woody Allen. He is the co-recipient of the 1977 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Annie Hall. He is also known for playing the banjo with Eric Weissberg in the 1960s, and for a series of comical parodies published in The New Yorker.
Tony Trischka has written several instructional books that discuss the Keith Style: Hot Licks For Bluegrass Banjo, Teach Yourself Bluegrass Banjo, and especially Melodic Banjo. The latter has interviews with many prominent Keith style banjoists, including Bill Keith and Bobby Thompson. Ken Perlman has helped to popularize the style in clawhammer banjo playing.
In popular music genres such as blues, jazz or rock music, a lick is "a stock pattern or phrase" consisting of a short series of notes used in solos and melodic lines and accompaniment. Licks in rock and roll are often used through a formula, and variations technique in which variants of simple, stock ideas are blended and developed during the solo.
Clawhammer, sometimes called frailing, is a distinctive banjo playing style and a common component of American old-time music.
