The Glory-Beaming Banjo

March is over, which means we're a quarter of the way through 2026. In the past, I used to provide quarterly reports  on my various musical goals, but I've gotten away from that kind of content over the last few years. You'd have to go back to 2024 for the last one I did, and further back to 2020 for the last time I provided a report on all four quarters of the year .  To keep me motivated and to give me a regular source of content, I figured I'd bring them back this year to see how they go. I'll use these regular posts as a kind of housekeeping and progress report of the last three months, along with any recent trends and happenings I deem important. So, here we go!  The stats Banjo: A strong January helped carry me through a light February. I stayed on target in March. So far, I've exceeded my benchmark for each month this year, and I'm trending in the right direction for this year's goals.  Fiddle:  As reported above, my January numbers helped car...

Happy Valentine's Day, banjo lovers! Can you believe it's been 15 years since I started this blog? It's true. On Feb. 14, 2011 , I made you all my banjo Valentines. More than 300 posts later, and I'm still complaining about not having enough time to practice, while looking for old-time records and trying learn more about Ohio's fiddle repertoire.  Let's revisit the Top 10 Glory-Beaming Banjo posts of all time 1. The Ultimate Banjo Joke Compendium | I love how this post keeps generating comments. Usually, it's from fellow banjo jokesters wanting to add another zinger to the list. However, my most recent favorite comment was from some anonymous person seemingly upset about all the laughs: " Some of us LIKE banjos 😡😤" You don't say? Well, guess what, I like banjos too. Why do you think I've spent the last 15 years writing about them? If you play banjo but can't take the jokes, then maybe this isn't the instrument for you. (24.4K vi...

March has been a relatively quiet month. However, I've maintained my pace to achieve this year's playing time goal so far. Aided by a jam in January and a festival in February, I've actually managed to stay ahead of the curve. With a few days left in March, I have amassed a total of 42 hours of playing time (21.5 banjo, 20.5 fiddle). If I keep this up, I'll reach 168 hours, exceeding my stretch goal of 150 hours.  Of course, a lot can change between now and December, but it's encouraging that I've maintained such a steady pace of playing banjo and fiddle these past three months.  As a reminder, I played 41 hours on each instrument for a total of 82 hours last year, so my minimum goal is to reach 42 hours on each instrument (total: 84 hours) in 2024, and I'm already halfway to reaching that goal. However, my primary goal is to surpass my 2022 total by playing 62 hours on each instrument (total: 124 hours). As I already mentioned, I'm currently on pace to...

Today marks 15 years since I started my banjo journey. Sometime in late 2007, I got the idea that I might  like to play the banjo. Pretty much all the music I was listening to at the time had a five-string, whether it was indie rock, alt country, bluegrass or old-time. Although back then, I didn't know the difference between bluegrass and old-time or that there were so many different ways of playing this plunky instrument. I didn't know what I was getting myself into, but I wanted to take the leap.  I try not to look back at my life with regrets, as I consider the mistakes I've made as opportunities to learn new lessons. That said, I did have one major regret. When I was in high school, I started to learn to play guitar. However, after a year or so, I gave it up. I can't help thinking how good I would be today if I had just stuck with it.  The idea of playing music has always appealed to me, but I didn't want to make the same mistake I made with the guitar as a teen...

Hello, is anyone still with me? This is not the publishing schedule I envisioned for this blog's 10th anniversary . Somehow it's been eight months since my last post . Even worse, after ending my epic streak of playing my instruments every day for almost a year and a half, my practice time lost all sense of consistency.  In fact, I have barely played music at all since July. Without open jams or local festivals, I seem to have lost my motivation to practice. I used to take my fiddle with me to the office and play in the park down the street during my lunch break. Now that I only go in once a week, I just don't feel like dragging along my gear to work anymore.  Being at home so much the past two years, you would think that I'd find more opportunities to pick up my banjo or fiddle. That has not been the case. I think last year, there was more focus on staying connected to the old-time community virtually, through online jams, workshops and performances. After another yea...

Continuing the celebration of the first 10 years of this blog, I thought I'd share the posts that you have liked most since 2011. I did something similar at the end of 2019 for the end of the decade. I almost copied and pasted that post here, but there has been a surprising amount of movement within and additions to the Top 10 since then.  One thing that struck me was how many posts from the first year of this blog remain on the Top 10. I'm also happy to see some posts highlighting my local banjo and old-time music community in Northeast Ohio. Without further ado, let's take a look at the most viewed Glory-Beaming Banjo posts of all time.  10. Sustainable Banjos: An Interview with Pisgah Banjos Founder Patrick Sawyer (2020) Our first post is the newest one to make the all-time list. I suspect it'll be climbing the ranks as time goes on and as Pisgah continues to produce excellent and affordable banjos. This post came out right as the pandemic was forcing shutdowns acr...

Back in February 2011, I decided to start a blog. This is it. A decade later I'm still writing about my journey learning to play the banjo and exploring old-time music. That wouldn't have been possible without YOU, yes, you the one reading this very sentence.  I started playing banjo in March 2008, fueled by my interest in such disparate artists as the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Sixteen Horsepower, Old Crow Medicine Show, Earl Scruggs, the Avett Brothers, Great Lake Swimmers, Roscoe Holcomb and Chatham County Line. What I didn't know then was that all the banjo playing by those musicians was of a different style. I started with Scruggs' style, but started flounder. However, by the end of the year, I discovered clawhammer and found my path forward.  That same year, I met my wife.  Three years later, I decided to start this blog as a way to share what I had learned, banjo things I was interested in, interviews with various banjo luminaries and otherwise flex my creative w...

Welcome to the new decade. As is usually the case, we start the year off with a statement of goals and purpose to carry us through to December. Last year ended pretty strong, finding success in learning some old chestnuts on fiddle and singing with the banjo. I wanted to continue that theme for 2020, so my theme for this year is "Jam Favorites" on fiddle and "John Songs" on banjo. Once again I'm hoping to increase my overall playing time. While I'm not sure how much more practice time I can wring out of my schedule, I'm hoping to reach those goals by finding a little more time to play with others, whether at local festivals, public old-time sessions or more intimate musical gatherings. A big goal of mine is to play my banjo more in a group setting, as I'm worried my jam skills are withering away with so much focus on the fiddle. A general goal is to record myself more often. This was a goal I set last year, but only managed to do once . To pu...

Ordering my banjo felt like a back-alley deal. I had driven almost an hour to a travel plaza just off the interstate. I was looking for a guy in a minivan and a small arsenal of banjos. Were these some kind of contraband goods? All I knew is that I wanted one. I met Bill Van Horn in a gas station parking lot off I-76 in Lodi, Ohio, on a steamy summer day. We first corresponded through the Banjo Hangout, an online forum for players. He had compared the banjos he built to the Enoch Tradesman, only way cheaper and with a Dobson tone ring. His banjos felt solid in my hand, and I loved the sound. After the meeting, I devised a savings plan and placed my order in mid-September. The banjo would have a thin 12-inch maple rim, a Fiberskyn head, no-knot tail piece, 24.25-inch scale walnut neck with Chechen wood fingerboard, a frailing scoop and a paddle-shaped peg head. Van Horn said it would be ready by the New Year. Being unmarried and having relatively few financial responsibilities at...

Happy New Year! Welcome back to Glory-Beaming Banjo. Last year ended on a positive note, and 2019 brings the promise of hope for another strong year of playing music and writing these here blog posts. With a bit of a hurdle yet to clear before 2018 ran out, I managed to surpass both of my playing time goals and end the year with a 50-day playing streak. I feel reasonably good about the tunes I learned last year, but I do still need to work on refining them. This year, I'm hoping to increase my playing time goals for banjo and fiddle and learn some more tunes, but I'm taking a break from the Ward Jarvis catalog . Instead, I'll be tackling some overlooked chestnuts as a means to improve my rhythm and expand my jam-friendly repertoire. When I started on the fiddle , I had little interest in learning the common tunes I already played on banjo. I jumped from Wayne Erbsen's Old-Time Fiddle for the Complete Ignoramus to Brad Leftwich's more complex bowing pattern...

This year is shaping up to be a big one for anniversaries. Not only has it been five years that I've been playing the fiddle , but Saturday marked 10 years since I got my first banjo . Yes, I know I've told this story before , but sometimes I still can't believe how naive I was when I decided to start playing banjo. When I sought advice on what instrument to buy, people asked what style of banjo I wanted to play. I was listening to a lot of Old Crow Medicine Show, Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Avett Brothers, and I was just starting to get into people like Earl Scruggs, Roscoe Holcomb and Dock Boggs. I wanted to sound like all those guys! I think I told someone I wanted to play like Old Crow and Scruggs, because I thought those were names that would be the easiest to define, and so I was steered toward a resonator banjo better suited to bluegrass. I had no idea what old-time was or that there was any other way to play the banjo besides that rolling three-finger pic...

Happy New Year, banjo friends! Welcome to 2018. I hope the holiday season was kind to you, and you had ample opportunity to play that five-string, or at least hear some good banjo music. Each new year brings the promise of rebirth. We all create goals or make resolutions to help start off the year right. I'm no different. For me, though, Jan. 1 also marks an anniversary. It was on that date five years ago that I started playing the fiddle . I bought my fiddle from my friend, Guy, who was also a big help over the years with numerous pointers. I got a decent carbon-fiber bow and started sawing my way through various instructional books and videos, including from Brad Leftwich , Bruce Molsky and Erynn Marshall . Last year, as you know, I broke away from the instruction materials to learn tunes from the repertoire of Ward Jarvis . That project has gone a long way toward developing my abilities. However, I know I have a lot of work yet ahead of me. As Dwight Diller once said, ...

My Recording King "Songster" with the resonator off after switching to clawhammer. N ine years ago is when I dipped my toe into the warm, welcoming waters of the banjo playing world. I had spent the past six months researching and trying to figure which banjo to buy. At some point, I had ordered a set of picks and tuner as a commitment to myself that I was going to carry through with my plan. The seed had been planted the year before when I read a blog post about buying your first guitar. The now-defunct blog specialized in Americana music and regularly featured groups like Old Crow Medicine Show, the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Avett Brothers. I had spent the the last four years building an obsession with the banjo through the music of those very same groups. Because much of the music that blog featured included the banjo, I wrote in asking if they had advice on buying a first banjo. Two of the blog's writers happened to play the five-string. One was a bl...

March 24 marks my seventh year playing the banjo. In the past, this date would be spent tallying my lifetime practice hours to see how close I've come to that magical 10,000-hour mark . Ever since taking up the fiddle, however, those hours have become sparser and sparser. My banjo now spends most of its time hanging on the wall. I'll let my son strum the strings as we pass by its place. He's much gentler now. A year ago , I would hold my breath fearing that he'd snap off the strings. The extent of my playing these days resides in noodling once or twice a week or the even rarer occasion of playing with friends at a party or festival. I'd much rather spend my free time tackling the beast that is the fiddle. The fiddle should be on top now.

Despite it being more than two months since my last post , this one comes early. The idea has been brewing since the beginning of March, when the realization that my banjo anniversary (banjoversary?) was this month. It was six years ago on March 24 that my banjo journey began. Recording King Songster For the first six months, my fingers flailed at Scruggs' style picking because that was the only way I knew of to play the banjo. When I bought my first banjo , I promised myself I wouldn't quit like I did with guitar back in high school. (These days I've really been wanting a guitar.) However, after half a year and meeting the woman who would be my wife, my banjo playing days were almost through. But then, hello, clawhammer! I was still learning the difference between what was bluegrass and what was old-time music back then. It seems so obvious today, but I didn't really know anybody then who could have shown me the path. I had to find it on my own. When I did,...