International Jazz Banjo Newsletter

This is your invitation to attend the Banjo Masters Workshop Sunday April 2, 2006 at the Arizona Banjo Blast. The workshop will be on the last day of the "Blast" at the Riverpark Inn in Tucson, AZ The workshop will begin promptly at 9:00am and end at 4:00pm. We will break for lunch around noon.The course will cover three areas of banjo playing. Learning to Play by Ear, Introduction to Improvisation, and Arranging Your Banjo Solos. In the Learning to Play by Ear section, we will discuss and put into practical use the knowledge of understanding chord progressions that evolve in many of the tunes we play. After taking this section of the course you will be better able to make educated guesses in playing by ear. In the Introduction to Improvisation, we will learn several ways to come up with musical ideas out of scales and chord structure to begin to improvise. The ideas are easy to learn and will help you in coming up with your own ideas in improvising using chord inversions, rhythms, and single string playing.
Arranging Your Banjo Solos is a way to bring the two other aspects of the course together to help you become a more complete player. Using your ear, the knowledge you have gained and implementing some improvisation are great tools, but you will find the last part of the course invaluable in making tunes that you play more than just songs. This part of the course will give you the tools to place your solos into a more musical setting. You will learn to create arrangements of your solos that are more complete. These are three of the twenty two courses I developed for the International Banjo College. They are designed to produce better banjo players.
I strongly encourage you to drop me an e-mail and sign up for this day of making yourself a more complete player. The $75.00 cost for the course is a great bargain and a portion of the proceeds will go to supporting the National Four String Banjo Hall of Fame Museum in Guthrie, Oklahoma.
I look forward to seeing many of you in Tucson next month. By the way, I was born there! .
For more info. go to the Arizona Banjo Blast Website at: http://4stringbanjos.com/AZBLAST2006

Scott Whitfield
jazzbanjo@earthlink.net
http://www.scottsoundnet.com/