Chords for Fretboard Geography with Banjo Legend Alan Munde!

[Em] _ [G] _ _ _ _ _ [Gm] _ _
_ _ _ _ [N] Howdy, Banjo Ben here at BanjoBenClark _ .com.
Thank you for joining us today.
If you've been on the site very long, you've heard me talk about a certain banjo player,
my favorite banjo player, who happened to be a teacher of mine for a couple years.
And I'm blessed enough to have him in the studio today, Mr.
Alan Mundy.
Welcome, Alan.
Oh, thanks for having me, Ben.
Every once in a while, you'll swing through Tennessee. _
From time to time, I do.
And you're on your way to teach at a camp, on your way back from IBMA.
And so thank you for stopping by.
_ _ _ Man, you know, there's so many things about your playing that so many people want to know
so much about.
Is that too many so's?
No, that's fine.
That's fine.
But there's one thing in particular that you're really good at explaining and that I know
lots of folks out there want to know.
And what you're going to talk to us about today is what you call fretboard geography.
Right.
Right?
Right.
Or how to know how to play the right notes.
Right.
How to know where to put your fingers.
How to know where to put your fingers.
Right.
Wouldn't that be great if everybody just knew that?
I've been working on it for a long, long time. _
Well, good.
So you have a way of explaining that, that you said that students tend to catch on pretty quickly.
Right, right.
Well, you know, for years and years, I've tried to teach.
And I would always teach these concepts separately, you know, sixths and thirds and _ just all the
different intervals you can play.
And _ stupid me realized at some point that it's just parts of these large diatonic chord
systems that are relatively easy to [Fm] learn.
And actually a lot of your players probably already know some of the [N] shapes, but they've
never just applied it in a systematic way.
_ So what we might [G] do is just look at the banjo and take one string and just look at one string.
If we play the G string _ and just play a [Db] scale, the G scale [G] on the G string, just up the string,
[C] so it's [Bb] like this. _
_ _ _ [Gm] _ So it's important to know those spots.
You know, those are, I call them, [Gb] _ [G] this old joke about _ walking on water.
[N] You know, the guy that can claim he can walk on water.
And he says, it's easy if you know where the rocks are.
Well, these are on the third string on the banjo in the [G] key of [D] G.
These are where the rocks are.
[E] And as [G] a student of the banjo, you need to know where those rocks are.
Okay, now if we go over to [B] the second string _ [Abm] and we played the G scale, the notes [Eb] of the
G scale, starting on a B [B] note, [D] and we did the same thing over [E] here.
_ [Bb] _ _
[Gm] _ _ [Bb] _ [G] _ _ _ All right.
And then we come over to the first string, do the same thing, starting on a D note of the scale,
[E] and just play the [Gb] G scale [G] [Dm] on the first string, [Em] we get these [Eb] notes right here.
_ Now, if we put all those together, [G] _ _
_ _ [Am] _ _ they come out as these [Bm] chord shapes.
_ [C] _ _ [D] _ _ [Em] _ _
[D] _ [G] _ And wouldn't you know it, that's where we get our chords from.
Yes.
It's exact, because we start with a chord.
Right.
G, B, D.
Right.
That's a G chord.
So every [N] _ _ _ _ scale _ step we make forms another chord.
So [G] this is G, _ and you'll recognize this as [Am] A minor.
And if you move that same shape up [Bm] two frets, you get D minor.
[C] Then you do a bar, that's C, there's [D] D, _ [Em] E minor.
We're going [D] to call this F sharp diminished.
Okay.
And [G] then this is G.
Okay.
_ [D] _ [Em] _ [D] _
_ [C] _ [Bm] _ [Am] _ _ [G] _ So you get these series of [N] chords that are called the diatonic chords.
And diatonic just means of the scale or through the scale.
So each chord, _ you're playing a note of the G scale.
So there are no foreign objects or weird notes or anything.
_ _ _ And you learn to use these.
But just real quickly, [G] _ _
a G chord is a G and a B.
_ And that's a third.
[N] We call it a third, because it's G, A, B.
They're a third apart.
[B] And then B [D] and D are a third apart in the scale also.
[G] So a G chord is two sets of thirds.
_ _ There's the second and third, the second [Bm] and first. _ _ _
So each of [Am] these chords is two sets of [Bm] thirds.
Every one of them?
[C] Yes.
Wow.
[D]
Okay.
_ [Db] _ [D] So the key to that [N] is not only knowing that scholastically, but what we're going to do
is teach you how to use that and _ why it's practical to know that.
Yes.
And in a _ _ sense, _ you don't need to know all of this.
What you really need to know is where you put your fingers and what it sounds like when
you put your fingers down like that.
And then one other quick observation before we actually use these is, if you look at this
system that I just played, it only uses three shapes.
It [G] uses a major shape, which is a [C] bar.
_ [D] _ _
[G] _ _ Then it uses the minor shape, which is [Am] this one.
_ [Bm] _ _ [Em] _ _ _
And then [D] it uses one diminished shape. Okay.
So each [N] system we're going to look at has one major shape, one minor shape, and one diminished shape.
So you play this whole system with just three shapes.
Okay.
So if you can learn three chord shapes, then you can learn all these diatonic chords, _ or diatonic shapes.
Yes.
And then the key to that is, what do we do with them?
Exactly.
And that's what we'll get to.
All right.
Great.
Well, I'm excited to jump into it.
All right.
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