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Lesson time: (4min 20sec)
Learn 'Fireball Mail', the Roy Acuff tune bluegrass players often take as an instrumental, pulling together the forward rolls and a handy one-beat tag on the banjo.
This lesson is part of the course Beginning Banjo with Avram Siegel
Watch a preview of the full course below.
Lesson transcript:
This next song uses the forward rolls and those forward roll concepts.
We just talked about the melody. This song is called Fireball Mail. It's a Roy Acuff song, but in bluegrass, a lot of times, people just play it as an instrumental.
The melody goes like this:
We could even add some rhythm to it. There were a couple of places in there where the melody left us with a space right there. The last melody note goes where a pinch would go, so we're left without something to do in that space.
There's actually something that works really well for that. It's a short tag that takes up one beat. It would sound like this:
So that happens twice in that song, and you can try playing it with that.
Now, let's learn the song with all the forward rolls and other rolls. We'll start with a slow version.
Little things you might want to note about how the forward roll works with this melody:
You can hear the beat change here:
So the beats go thumb, 1, 2, and then the roll changes up. This happens a few times in this song. The same thing occurs again here.
Avram Siegel is a banjo player and a mainstay of the California bluegrass scene. He has played with the Kathy Kallick Band and True Blue, among many others, and has taught for decades - his step-by-step method has turned out some of the state's most respected young players. In his courses he breaks down three-finger Scruggs rolls, backup and melodic playing so you can build clean timing and tone at your own pace. read more
