Bluegrass FAQ

Questions, Answered

What actually counts as bluegrass?

A string band playing acoustic instruments — guitar, upright bass, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, often a dobro — with the melody passed around as breaks, driving rhythm split across the seats, and close vocal harmony on top. If everyone is reading from charts, it is probably not a bluegrass jam yet.

The tighter answer is that bluegrass is defined by its division of labour rather than by a song list. A string band with the seats split the bluegrass way — a floor, a backbeat, a continuous fill, one lead at a time, harmony stacked above the melody — will sound like bluegrass playing material from anywhere at all, and a band without that split will not sound like bluegrass playing the most standard repertoire in the world. It is an arrangement style before it is a genre, which is why the band page is the first thing on this site.

The neighbours are close and the borders are friendly. Old-time uses many of the same tunes with everyone playing the melody at once and nobody taking breaks. Country shares a great deal of the songbook and adds a drummer. The newer strains keep the seats and stretch the harmony. Nobody at a jam is checking your papers — but turn up expecting to play the melody in unison all night and you have walked into a different circle, and it will become clear inside one tune.

Which instrument should I start on?

The one you will practice. Guitar is the most common door into a jam because rhythm guitar is always needed; upright bass players get invited to everything; banjo, fiddle and mandolin each carry a signature role you can hear on the band page. Every instrument's deep home is its own Warrior site.

Two practical notes on top of that. The seats are not equally in demand: every jam has spare guitars and hardly any has a spare bass player, so if part of your choice is about being useful, the low end is the fastest route to being genuinely wanted in a room. And on any instrument, the fastest route to playing with people is rhythm — being able to hold the changes at tempo while somebody else takes a break is worth more on a first night than any lick you could learn instead.

Whichever you pick, the technique lives on that instrument's own Warrior site rather than here. This site's job starts once you can make the sound: what the seat is for, when it plays, when it shouldn't, and how it fits with the other five.

What key will the jam call?

Usually G, A, B or D — singers pick the key that suits their voice, and the common keys are the ones where the band's open strings and capo habits line up. The jam-keys page explains who capos and who transposes.

What that means for you depends on your seat: two of the six move a capo and keep their shapes, and the rest re-finger and think nothing of it. Either way the key is a fact about somebody's voice rather than an opening position in a negotiation. The right response to hearing one that does not suit your hands is to spend the first pass listening rather than the first pass guessing loudly. And once in a while somebody calls a flat key, which is a genuinely awkward moment for a band built out of open strings — awkward enough that the jam-keys page gives it a section to itself.

Do I need to read music?

No. Bluegrass is an ear tradition: tunes are learned from records and from the circle, and a jam communicates in keys, numbers and nods rather than notation.

What replaces notation is a small shared vocabulary. Chords get described as numbers rather than letters so that a song survives being moved to another singer's key, forms get described in bars, and everything else is carried by eye contact. Being able to read is no handicap — plenty of very good players can — but reading off a page at a jam keeps your eyes down, and your eyes are how you find out it is your turn.

Your ears do the heavy lifting, and they improve faster than most people expect once they are required to. Learning tunes off recordings is slow for the first few and then noticeably quicker, because the standards share so much of their material that the fifth one is largely pieces of the first four in a new order.

Where do I find a jam?

They are far more frequent than they are advertised. The reliable places to ask are acoustic instrument shops — somebody behind the counter always knows, and often hosts one — along with local bluegrass and old-time associations, folk clubs, and the festival circuit in season. Festivals are essentially enormous jams with a stage attached, and the car park after dark is where most people play the most music of their year.

If you are starting, look for the words “slow jam”. They exist precisely for this, they run the same protocol as every other circle at a survivable tempo, and the people who run them do it because they enjoy bringing new players in. Turning up once without your instrument, just to listen, is also an entirely respectable move — one evening of that will tell you more about the local repertoire and the local tempo than any amount of reading, this page very much included.