Machines and music: instrumental contributions to bluegrass — Popular Music

Claims

1. banjo-styles
   Bluegrass banjo has three predominant styles: Scruggs style, which plays the melody on lower strings interspersed with chord tones in patterns called rolls; melodic or 'Keith' style, which spreads the melody across strings to follow a fiddle tune more closely; and single-string or 'Reno' style. In a Scruggs-style break the melody is often simplified to allow more chord tones.

   "Scruggs style uses three fingers (thumb, index and middle) and generally involves playing the melody notes on lower strings, while other strings intersperse the melody with chord tones, utilising different patterns of string ordering (referred to as banjo rolls)."

   Locator: page: 477–478, 489 · Quote language: en
2. crosspicking
   Crosspicking, a common guitar and mandolin technique using three-string groupings that cut against normal plectrum picking, reflects the influence of the three-finger banjo's syncopated three-note groupings on other instruments in the bluegrass ensemble.

   "However, crosspicking needs to be viewed in relation to the bluegrass ensemble, where the three-fingered technique of the banjo often leads to three-note grouping, syncopated across strong beats."

   Locator: page: 484 · Quote language: en
3. instrument-shapes-improvisation
   In bluegrass fiddle tunes, each repetition is usually played by a different instrument; Newton argues the instrument itself shapes improvised material, even the pitch collections used, beyond mere idiomatic fit, and that the contrast between instrument-shaped passages can mark formal structure and act as a genre marker.
   Locator: section: Abstract
4. jam-leader-varies-instruments
   Jam leaders, who decide who takes each break, often order players so that the same instrument does not take two breaks in a row; Newton argues the form of a fiddle tune grows out of this cycling through instruments.

   "the leader of a jam (the person who decides who takes each break) often ordering players to avoid repetition of the same instrument, if more than one of a particular instrument is present"

   Locator: page: 480, 489 · Quote language: en
5. playing-in-the-style-of
   Because banjo styles are named after individual players (Scruggs, Keith, Reno), Newton describes playing in one of these styles as asking how that player and banjo together would navigate a passage, even one the original player never played.

   "To play Scruggs style (or Keith style or Reno style) is to ask how Earl Scruggs and his banjo, together, would navigate a passage."

   Locator: page: 489 · Quote language: en
6. tune-vs-song-breaks
   Breaks can differ between fiddle tunes and songs: a common jam saying holds that in a fiddle tune you play the tune, while in a song you play to the harmony rather than the melody; Newton notes this is not universal, but that playing to the chords is far more common in songs.

   "when you take a break in a fiddle tune, you play the tune, but when you take a break in a song, you don’t play the tune"

   Locator: page: 480 · Quote language: en