Playing Backup Banjo - A Primer

Written by David Bandrowski

The first thing to remember when playing backup is that it is NOT ALL ABOUT YOU. You are playing to complement what the vocalist or lead instrument is playing.  This does not make you less important though.  A great lead instrumentalist will not sound great if they are playing with a bad rhythm section.  On the other hand an average lead instrumentalist can sound very good with a great rhythm section. 

Music is all about rhythm. You can play any notes in a hip rhythm and it will sound cool.  While all of the most beautiful melodies in the world, played with the wrong or bad/broken rhythm will sound awful.  This concept of the importance of rhythm is accentuated when playing backup because after all – you are now part of the RHYTHM section.

So to start playing backup in any style of music, you will have to figure out the harmony (chords) of the tune.  Let’s take a simple 12 bar blues to start out. (A bar is the same as a measure.  In 4/4 time, the most common time signature in western music, we have 4 beats to the measure/bar).  Let’s play this blues in the key of G.  The symbol  “ / ” means to repeat the same chord as in the previous measure.

Here are the chords:

|| G | C | G | / |

 | C | /  | G | /  |

 | D | C | G | / ||

Let’s start off by strumming the banjo down on each beat.  We should be strumming it 4 times for each measure. 

When you are comfortable with this, let’s move on to playing on the off beats of each measure.  This means playing on beats 2 and 4.  So on beat 1 we don’t play anything, beat 2 we strum down, beat 3 we don’t play anyting, and beat 4 we strum down again.  Remember that each measure has four beats, so after beat 4, we will move on to the next measure and play the appropriate chord.

The next step is to start strumming different rhythms or adding a picking pattern over the appropriate chords.  Choose a strumming or picking pattern that you are comfortable with and play over the 12 bar blues.  When the vocalist or lead instrument pauses at the end of their phrase, you then have a little spot in which you can fill in a lick.  Keep it relatively simple though because remember that we don’t want to overplay and clash with the lead instrument or vocalist.  We want to blend and enhance what is going on by the lead instrument or vocalist.

A good analogy is when you are cooking food, you need to season your food with salt and pepper or else it can taste bland.  You don’t want to add so much salt though that it tastes salty.  The same is true in music, when you are backing someone up, you want to ad enough seasoning through your playing, but not so much that it overtakes the lead instrument or vocalist.

Now try using different inversions of these chords and strum or pick over them. 

Click here to read about chord inversions on the 5-string banjo…