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Your first picking techniques will be the “pinch” and the “bum ditty,” and you’ll learn how to use them in the context of an old favorite that BB calls “Boil Them Cabbages Down.” More commonly known as “Boil (or Bile) Them Cabbage Down,” this ubiquitous folk ditty is a great first banjo tune. BB starts by showing you the three chords you’ll need for playing “Boil Them Cabbage Down” in the key of G: G, C, and D. Then she’ll show how to play the basic melody and combine it with a “pinch” and a “bum ditty.” In this video, BB shows you a basic “pinch” for playing two strings together using the thumb and middle finger, and walks you through the first half of the melody and how to combine that with the pinch.
| The Drop-Thumb Roll |
| The Drop-Thumb Roll, Part 1 |
The banjo “roll” is the defining technique of three-finger bluegrass banjo. Rolls come in many different picking patterns, and in this lesson, BB shows how to integrate a drop-thumb roll (sometimes called a “square roll”) into the chord progression for “Boil Them Cabbage Down,” which you learned in the previous lesson. There are a number of string possibilities with most banjo rolls, but for this lesson, you’ll use a consistent pattern starting with the thumb picking the third string, the index finger picking the second string, the thumb picking the fifth string, and the middle finger picking the first string: thumb-index-thumb-middle.
