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Welcome everyone to my new monthly column All Strings Considered! I’d like to give a big thanks to Donald Nitchie for encouraging my return as a regular BNL contributor as well as to Mary Katherine Aldin for coming up with such a fantastic name for this column. I’ve taught a lot of folks in the last thirty-five years, both in private one on one lessons and in group workshops. With All Strings Considered, I want to share what I’ve learned with an emphasis on practical and easy to learn skills and techniques that will help all level players feel more confident and have more fun playing with others in jam sessions and in bands. I’d love your input and suggestions for future topics, so feel free to e-mail me at bevans@nativeandfine.com with your ideas. Also, don’t forget to check out my sound files on the new BNL website where I explain and play each month’s examples. In hearing these online excerpts and memorizing the sound of each exercise, you’ll learn these patterns a lot faster and remember them much more easily.

For my first several columns, I want to examine perhaps the most important accompaniment skill in bluegrass banjo: playing driving forward rolls in down the neck back-up. Because of the nature of the forward roll, which by definition contains some combination of notes played by the right hand thumb, index and middle fingers in succession, many of us have a hard time comfortably fitting this particular roll into the 2/4 or 4/4 time signature of most bluegrass songs. I’ll begin this month with some basic one measure patterns and I’ll slowly build upon these in subsequent columns so that by around the time of the first spring thaw, you will be well on your way to creating the kind of driving, bonafide bluegrass sounding backup favored by many contemporary bluegrass banjo players today.

Let’s get started! First, take a look at two ways of playing the forward roll against the G, C and D chords—see Example 1 below.

When I teach this way of playing forward roll patterns to private students, I relate that it’s the order of the right hand fingers that defines the roll, not necessarily the strings that are being played. In these examples, the forward roll is made up of a sequence of either seven notes (beginning with a right hand thumb quarter note that takes up the space of two roll notes) T - rest - T - I - M - T - I - M or eight notes in the sequence of T - M - T - I - M - T - I - M. Note that in each of the examples above, the order of right hand events is the same regardless of the chord that’s being played. You can choose whichever roll seems right for you at that moment, as they both occupy exactly one measure.

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