Nashville Acoustic Camps

Clawhammer Banjo Basic Technique Intensive - Zoom Workshops with Ivan Rosenberg
Presented by Nashville Acoustic Camps

Wednesdays in May
5/7, 14, 21, 28
7:30pm Central

You do not need to attend the workshops live. Everyone who registers gets the recordings and supplemental materials.
We will confirm your registration as soon as possible once you register - if your PayPal email address does not match the address you use for correspondence, please send a separate email to fiddlestar33@gmail.com to let us know.

Clawhammer Banjo Basic Technique Intensive with Ivan Rosenberg

This workshop series is for everyone from beginners who bought their first banjo yesterday to experienced players who are unsatisfied with their technique. We’re going to meticulously train our hands to strike clean, powerful notes on all strings, with a real focus on the inside strings, where most players have trouble getting good tone, volume, and accuracy. We’ll learn and refine “double thumbing” technique and the “bum ditty” rhythm, which is THE make-or-break rhythmic technique for clawhammer. We’ll learn a few options for doing it well and learn to avoid the many pitfalls aspiring players encounter. After sufficiently focusing on the claw hand (which we’ll continually revisit throughout the workshop series), we’ll add the fretting hand and learn the fretboard up to the 5th fret in G major tuning, a few chords, and good hammer-on/pull-off/slide technique. In the latter portion of the workshop series, we’ll apply what we’ve learned to a couple of songs, and I'll send you off with drop thumb technique. All the while we’ll be refining our hands, fingers, fingernails, arms, and banjo hold to optimize our sound and consistency. I even have games and prizes planned to encourage y’all to practice the fundamentals in a way that will truly drill them into your muscle memory and tactile memory.

In addition to the four classes, I’ll hold some office hours during Week 1 and Week 2 (date and time TBA) to check in with anyone who has questions or needs help, and if you still need attention after that, I’ll find time for more office hours or even short one-on-one sessions. Our motto for this workshop is “No claw left behind!”

Throughout the workshop, we’ll be laser-focused on developing an easy-to-follow practice routine that will deliver real results. All classes are recorded—they can be streamed and downloaded, and you can keep them forever. I’ll also provide tablature of exercises, songs, and chords.

Sidebar: I’m better known as a Dobro player/instructor, but I released two well-received clawhammer albums, one of which was given a full spread in Banjo Newsletter, before I was even aware of many technique-related details I’m going to show you. After setting the banjo down for years, I relearned clawhammer from the ground up, so the technique-refinement process is relatively fresh for me, and I’m looking forward to showing you all the details nobody talked about back when I was first learning.

If you have any questions about the workshop series content, please email me at ivanDrosenberg@gmail.com. If you have questions about registration, payment, or using Zoom, please contact our Nashville Acoustic Camps host, Megan Lynch Chowning, at fiddlestar33@gmail.com. Hope to see you there! Ivan

p.s. you need some amount of fingernail beyond the flesh of your fingertips to play in this style – try not to clip the nails of your index and middle fingers of your claw hand too short during this workshop series—especially before the first class!

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