Every Chair in the Circle

Every seat in the circle, with the reference material for playing it and the job it does while somebody else is taking the break.

The instruments below make a bluegrass band, and each one is there to do a job the others are not doing at that moment. That division of labour is what the band page is about. This page is the other half of it: the reference material for actually playing each chair — every chord, every scale, every key read as the number a caller would shout, and a map of the whole neck.

None of these is ours. Every one of them has a deep home elsewhere in the Warrior Network — the site that covers its whole family, its alternate tunings, its technique and its gear — and every page below carries the door there. What you get here instead is the bluegrass reading: the same chord, framed by the key that got called and the seat you are sitting in.

Pick a chair

Guitar

The floor everything else is timed against. Chords for holding it down, scales for the flatpicked break, and a neck map for finding the same shape two frets along.

EADGBE

Mandolin

The backbeat, and a lead voice the moment it stops chopping. Closed chord shapes that damp cleanly, and the short scales a tremolo break is cut from.

GDAE

Banjo

The engine room of eighth notes. Chord positions the rolls run through, scales that say which string the melody is waiting on, and the whole gDGBD neck mapped.

GDGBD

Fiddle

The voice that answers the singer. No frets to correct you, so these are position maps and double stops — with playback to keep the intonation honest.

GDAE

Upright Bass

One note at a time, and the room hears every one as the chord. Fingerboard positions, root-and-fifth shapes, and the scales the walk between them comes from.

EADG

Dobro

The answering voice, slid in where the singer leaves a hole. A steel bar across open G, so every chord is a fret to lay the bar on — and the scales a slid break is built from.

GBDGBD

Every reference page, chair by chair

Four sections per chair. Chords and scales run to every root and every quality; the keys page reads a key the way a jam calls it; the explorer maps the whole board.

Guitar — boom-chuck floor

Mandolin — chop on the backbeat

Banjo — eighth-note fill engine

Fiddle — sustaining voice

Upright Bass — root and fifth on the downbeats

Dobro — the answering voice

The dobro, and why some of its chords draw nothing

The bluegrass dobro is a squareneck resonator played face-up in open G with a steel bar, and that is exactly the instrument charted here: every chord is a straight bar across one fret or a short slant of it, never a fretted grip. Open G can only sound what its strings become under the bar, so a quality the tuning cannot spell that way keeps its page — the page says so plainly and draws nothing — and its root's chord list marks it. In a circle that is ordinary work: the dobro plays the part of the chord a bar can reach, or a single-string line through it, and leaves the rest to the guitar and the mandolin. The resonator family's deep home — its tunings, its technique, the whole of its chord library — is Guitar Warrior, and every dobro page here doors to the same page there.