Molten Boron

Goddamnit, I just read this right before I'm supposed to call Office Depot and be very serious about a messed-up order. Now I'm going to be complaining that I didn't get my pull-off.

Now I don't think you're mature enough to read about the banjo.

I'm really not. The first thing I was going to say as a comment was, "Oh, the alternating thumb roll. I've used that one. It's pretty good!"

I could make reasonably mature comments about guitar instead, such as, "The slide, hammer-on, and pull-off are all used in guitar also, and when you mentioned being skeptical about the applications of the slide I just happened to have a song running through my head that made very good use of the slide not only for notes but even for whole chords." But that's kind of boring.

Yeah, after I made the post I listened to some songs and started noticing the slide in songs where I hadn't before. I think a big part of my cognitive problem is that I'm doing the slide slowly, and outside the context of a song. It's something that doesn't seem to sound good on its own, but works well at playing speed mixed into a song.

The general theme in Bluegrass Banjo seems to be "Play the melody, but throw in 3-4 extra 'fill' notes for every melody note played." This sounds silly when you play it at a slow practice speed, and you wonder why you're doing it. Then you listen to the exact same song played at "medium play speed," which is about 5 times faster than I can play at the moment, and suddenly it sounds like banjo music. So I've come to accept that most of the stuff I'm learning won't sound at all good until I develop a lot of finger speed.