Have You Practiced Tuning Your Banjo?

With all of the emphasis on practicing right-hand rolls and left-hand pull-offs, it's easy to overlook a key factor in whether your playing sounds good or not: Playing In Tune. Playing in tune is so basic that there's often little more attention paid to it than being told "get an electronic tuner". But of course there's a lot more to it than that. Granted nobody wants to spend their first six banjo lessons learning how to get better and better at tuning the darn thing. No, you want to tune it, and get on about learning to play songs on it as soon as you can. After all, you were attracted to the banjo in the first place when you heard someone playing it, not when you heard someone tuning it.

Just like being able to play a solid, rhythmic right-hand roll is an ongoing process, so is being able to play in tune. It's not a "set it and forget it" deal. From the time you take the banjo out of the case until you put it back in, playing in tune is a continuous feedback loop made up of two parts: 1) playing the banjo and 2) listening to the banjo. It's how you know if you've played a snappy pull-off, a solid backward roll, or whether or not you got to the C chord at the 8th fret fast enough. And it's how you can tell if you're playing in tune: you listen critically to the sound coming from your banjo (the sound that you, the banjo player, are making).

Once again, being a good listener joins the discussion of how to be a good player. The better your ability to hear pitch becomes, the better you'll be at playing in tune, and the better banjo player you'll be. Have you ever seen someone take their banjo out of the case, turn on the electronic tuner and start turning the tuning pegs all without ever having hit a single note to start with? What was wrong with the tuning the banjo was already in? We'll never know. Tuning the banjo is about listening to the sound, not looking at a digital display on a tuner.

A tuner is a tool that can tell you if an individual note on your banjo matches the pitch of a pre-determined standard within its circuitry. That's it. This is not the same thing as developing your ear so that you can learn to play in tune. Using a tuner without listening is like playing from tab without listening. It can be done, but the results always fall below what I consider to be the minimum standard for playing good music. 

So I suggest that you practice tuning your banjo. Think of it this way: if you wanted to improve your ability to play a 3-2 pulloff on the 3rd string, you wouldn't wait until you were at a jam session hoping to get a shot at playing the third measure of Fire Ball Mail. No, you would practice that 3-2 pulloff over and over and over at home, independent from using it in a song. You can apply this process to improving your ability to 1) tune your banjo and 2) play in tune.

Here's one way that you can start practicing tuning your banjo

Start by brushing your thumb pick across all five strings. Do this three or four times so that you establish a good starting point for the sound you'll be working with. Now play just the 5th and 1st strings together with a pinch. Now play a pinch on the 3rd and 1st strings. Now a pinch on the 4th and 1st strings. Do this several times. Don't just go through the motions, listen to what you're doing. Get used to hearing the blend of the notes. The sound of the 1st string with the high G note of the 5th string. The sound of the 1st string with the low G note of the 3rd string. The sound of the 1st string with the low D note of the open 4th string - hey, the 1st and 4th strings are an octave apart - so, that's what an octave sounds like.

Now, get out your tuner and as carefully as possible tune each string until it perfectly matches the readout on your tuner. Take as long as necessary to put your banjo in standard tuning. Depending on the accuracy of your tuner and your ability to manipulate the tuning pegs, you may or may not actually be "in tune" at the end of this process. Turn the tuner off and go back to the preceding paragraph and play the strings as indicated, focusing on the sound.

Now comes the scary part where you turn the tuning pegs and you decide whether the banjo is becoming more in tune or more out of tune. Start by playing the 1st and 3rd strings together. Just the 1st and 3rd strings - play a pinch with the thumb picking the 3rd and the middle finger picking the first. Slowly, very slowly - extremely slowly - start turning the 3rd string tuning peg lower, all the while playing a pinch on the 3rd and 1st strings. Is the sound becoming more in tune? Or does the blend of the two strings sound worse than when you started?

This is the crux of the matter

1. You play two strings together.
2. You might be in tune, but you're not sure.
3. You turn a tuning peg.
4. Are you more in tune than you were, or have you gone further out of tune?

That's what you need to practice: practice listening to how two or more strings blend together. Remember, the tuner can only tell you about one note at a time. But you, the human with the brain, the ears, the banjo, and the desire to be a better banjo player - you've got the ability to learn to tell when two notes blend together in tune.

So, spend some time turning those tuning pegs and listening to how the sound changes.

Use the electronic tuner as a reference, but remember when you hear someone say, "The tuner says I'm in tune", to ask your ears if they would agree.