Reminder: there’s still time to pre-order my upcoming book and get my “Genius Toolkit” as a free bonus (details below). Huge thanks to all of you who’ve pre-ordered it already!

In 2001, I got a banjo for Christmas. It was my first year of medical residency, one of the most grueling years of my life. I was working 80 to 90 hours a week.

In other words, I had hardly any time to practice, and certainly no time for regular lessons with a teacher.

On top of that, other than being a music lover, I didn’t have a musical background. Neither of my parents played an instrument.

But I’d always loved the sound of the banjo. Just strumming the open strings of my new banjo sounded so good. I desperately wanted to learn how to play it.

But was I delusional to think that I could?

I decided to crowdsource this question. This was the early days of the internet, back when forums were big. And so I went onto the banjo forums to get the general consensus.

The verdict: don’t bother.

Not the answer I wanted.

To learn to play the banjo well, they told me, you needed to do three things. Start young. Have natural ability. Practice several hours a day.

Without those three, I might manage to feebly plod my way through a few simple tunes. But that was the best I could hope for.

Given my circumstances, I’d be better off just selling the thing. I’d probably get more joy from the proceeds than from playing it.

But part of me still wasn’t convinced. That skepticism came from a mix of my own experience with conventional wisdom and, more importantly, from what I’d learned about the brain.

I was a neuroscience major in college, and I was especially interested in learning and plasticity. The conventional wisdom on the forums was grounded in the idea of a fixed brain, one you’re issued at birth with a set of natural abilities and aptitudes.

The emerging research was showing something very different. It said I could learn to play.

So, against the advice of the experts, I gave it a go. I bought a book on how to play and set about my journey to guaranteed disappointment.

I practiced in the cracks in my day, rarely more than 20 minutes at a time, a few times a week at best. I knew that if this was going to work, I had to make the practice count. So I prioritized quality over quantity, taking what I knew about how the brain learns and building it into how I practiced.

And, lo and behold, I started getting better. In a matter of a few months, I could play things I never thought I could. Maybe the skeptics were wrong, after all!

But then came a rude awakening.

At a banjo camp, one of the instructors I admired asked me to pick a tune with him.

He kicked it off, and it might as well have been my first time ever touching the instrument. Everything I thought I knew was gone. Total train wreck.

Maybe the skeptics were right after all.

Maybe I could play well enough in the comfort of my living room, but making music with other people was reserved for the musically gifted.

Or maybe I just needed to change my approach. Maybe it wasn’t my ungifted brain that had let me down. Maybe it was how I’d been learning. So I changed up my practice.

I realized that if I wanted to reach my goals, I had to be able to play by ear, which I couldn’t do at the time. The books didn’t teach that. And I’d been told, in no uncertain terms, that you can’t learn to do that. That you’re either born with the ability to play by ear or you aren’t.

Once again, I thought the brain science was suggesting otherwise. And once again, the skeptics turned out to be wrong. My ear was the roadblock, and training it got me around it.

Through this approach, not only was I able to learn banjo, but also guitar, ukulele, fiddle, and piano, learning them all as an adult with a busy schedule.

It wasn’t the brain I was born with, but the brain I built. And if I could do it, so could anyone.

That was the spark that became the Brainjo Method of instruction, the company Brainjo, and later the book Anyone Can Play Music. Because of it, thousands of adult beginners all over the world are now making music they’d been told they’d never be able to make.

That decision to start — and stick with — the banjo has changed and enriched my life in more ways than I could’ve ever imagined.

Here’s the thing I want you to remember, and the reason I’m sharing this:

Had I listened to the conventional wisdom, that typical story about music brains and natural aptitudes, I never would have started.

And when I got humiliated at that banjo camp, I would have taken it as proof that the story was right all along, that I just didn’t have it, that you’re either born able to play by ear or you’re not.

A different story is what changed my life.

That’s the same story I take aim at in my new book, The Genius and the Impostor. I call it the Special Brain Story.

It’s the story most of us inherited. It says we’re all born with different kinds of brains. Math brains, music brains, art brains, and so on.

It says we each come with a certain quantity of intelligence, like every brain is issued its own fixed amount of smart juice.

And the kind of brain you have, along with how much smart juice you got, determines what’s possible for you. It determines what you can do with your mind. The greatest minds, the Einsteins of the world, simply got the most.

This story is wrong.

That story was written before we understood the brain at all. Our whole account of human intelligence and potential was written without any regard for the organ that intelligence and potential actually comes from.

That’s like explaining how circulation works without ever studying the heart. Or how digestion works without ever looking at the stomach. Of course it isn’t going to be right.

I’ve studied the brain my entire life. And when you start with the brain, you end up in a very different place.

The special brain story is wrong. And whether you ever notice it or not, that story shapes the entire arc of your life.

And the special brain story reaches far beyond music, or any single endeavor. It shapes what you’ll take on and what you’ll walk away from, because you’ll never even start what you think isn’t possible.

But the accurate story, the one that actually starts with the brain, is a far more hopeful one. It says your capacity is something you build, in music and in everything else.

That’s what The Genius and the Impostor is about. Because understanding what you’re truly capable of begins with understanding how your own brain actually works, and who you really are.

Pre-order The Genius and the Impostor today and get the “Genius Toolkit”.

The Genius Toolkit is my own field guide to getting into, and staying in, the brain state where your best work happens.

That’s the virtuous cycle for unlocking your Genius Mode. In the toolkit, I’ll walk you through each of the steps, and tell you what each of them looks like in my own life.

Here’s how to get it:

1. Pre-order the book → Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop

2. Forward your receipt to geniustoolkit@gmail.com.

3. I’ll email the toolkit right back.

That’s it! And when you read the book, I’d love it if you let me know what you think — that’s the part I look forward to most!

The Genius Toolkit is my thank-you for pre-ordering, and it’s only available until the book comes out on August 25. If you were going to read it anyway, ordering now is how you get the toolkit with it (and pre-orders are actually a huge help for a new book).

The book comes out August 25. It’s about the neuroscience of human potential: why you’re capable of far more than you’ve been led to believe, and what actually unlocks it. You can pre-order it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and other fine bookstores.

I’d love for you to read it, and so as a gentle nudge I’ll send you a free bonus straightaway for ordering it (details below)…

Pre-order today and get the “Genius Toolkit”.

The Genius Toolkit is my own field guide to getting into, and staying in, the brain state where your best work happens.

That’s the virtuous cycle for unlocking your Genius Mode. In the toolkit, I’ll walk you through each of the steps, and tell you what each of them looks like in my own life.

Here’s how to get it:

1. Pre-order the book → Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop

2. Forward your receipt to geniustoolkit@gmail.com.

3. I’ll email the toolkit right back.

That’s it! And when you read the book, I’d love it if you let me know what you think — that’s the part I look forward to most!

Josh

P.S. The Genius Toolkit is my thank-you for pre-ordering, and it’s only available until the book comes out on August 25. If you were going to read it anyway, ordering now is how you get the toolkit with it.

Bryan Sutton, whom I recently interviewed, is one of the finest flatpickers alive. Three Grammys, ten-time IBMA Guitar Player of the Year, a first-call session guitarist in Nashville for over two decades. He started learning guitar at a young age. Once he made up his mind that he wanted to learn it, progress came quickly.

“The learning came really easily to me. I have memories of just being able to pick up stuff pretty quickly.”

We have a term to describe people like this. Naturals. People for whom something seems to come easily.

Easier than it comes to the rest of us.

That was clearly the case for Bryan. Chances are that if you’ve taken up guitar or any musical instrument at some point, you probably wouldn’t describe it as he did. You’d more than likely remember hours of struggle punctuated by the occasional win rather than smooth sailing down the river to virtuosity.

The reasonable conclusion? That naturals were born with something you weren’t. A gift written into their genetic code, waiting for the right moment to show itself.

If you’re born with the gift for music, then music comes easily. If you aren’t, your fate is struggle and toil.

Moreover, that’s how it felt to Bryan, too.

“Learning, I don’t say was easy, but it was just natural.”

It all seems to fit a tidy narrative. A story we’ve told for ages.

But there’s a problem with that story.

What’s Wrong with the Natural?

What precisely is the problem with the story of the natural? With the idea of innate ability inherited through your DNA.

We can’t find evidence for it.

The first issue is that, in the literal sense, nobody is born knowing how to do much of anything. At birth, we humans are notoriously among the most unskilled and inept creatures in all the animal kingdom.

Yes, we are also notorious for having some of the most impressive cognitive gifts in the animal kingdom, chief among them our linguistic abilities.

But those gifts, like every other impressive human ability, are built.

Which means that when we talk of being born with a gift for music, we really mean that we think someone was born with some type of genetic predisposition for music. A gene that paves the way for it.

Which brings us to the second problem.

It wasn’t that long ago that we expected genetics to explain most of who we become. It was thought that once we sequenced the human genome, we’d soon find the math gene, the music gene, the funny gene, the chess gene, the unicycling gene, the thumb wrestling gene.

But none of that panned out. The central lesson of the post-genome era is that genes account for far less of the variability in our abilities and traits than we thought.

Environment and experience account for much more than we were expecting. That includes the research on musical expertise, which shows that it is predicted largely by environment and training.

So, if it’s not in the genes, if it’s not something we’re born with, where does it come from? Why was it easier for Bryan?

To answer that, you only need to look at something your own brain already pulled off, before you turned three.

Something Hidden

Our brain’s superpower is its ability to identify patterns, or “regularities,” in the information that it processes. That ability underwrites every cognitive skill we have.

Our brain does this with anything we pay close attention to.

And that system starts working the moment we’re born. We find patterns in visual information that allow us to identify shapes, colors, faces, trees, cats and dogs. We find patterns in auditory information that allow us to identify barks, moos, wind, and rain.

And of course we train that system on the sounds of our native language to start extracting its many patterns.

Now, think of a child learning language. What always comes first? Comprehension.

We must know what we want to say before learning how to say it.

When we’re born, the sounds of our native tongue are meaningless, undifferentiated noise. No different than the sounds of any language you don’t speak today.

This was a monumental perceptual and conceptual task. You had to first identify the sonic building blocks, or “phonemes.” In the English language, that means about 44 phonemes. Then all the words. Then the rules for how those words are put together. Not only what the words mean, but how changing the order changes the meaning.

Your brain had to reverse engineer all of it, without instruction, from the inputs you received, which was language in its final form. There was no manual telling you where one word ended and another began. Or one phoneme from the next. Or how the order of words changed their meaning.

Your brain built all of that on its own, using its pattern finding superpowers.

And THEN you started trying to produce the sounds. Then, with those networks for decoding and comprehension in place, you began building the motor skills.

You knew what you wanted to say, and then began the project of figuring out how to say it.

And what did it take for your brain to perform that ridiculous feat of reverse engineering to build those insanely complex cognitive networks? Why did you learn your native language and not another one?

Because that’s what everyone around you was using to communicate. You had a burning need to learn to communicate, so you started paying close attention.

And you had a rich stream of data to learn from. You were surrounded by those sounds, all the time. Plus, you were surrounded by other humans who wanted to help you learn.

Crucially, all of this happens passively. One day you simply notice your child understands what you're saying. Nobody sees the work that made it possible, so it feels like magic.

The brain just needs two things to build these advanced pattern detection systems: attention and data. Your Genius builds pattern detection systems for what it cares about. And the more data it gets, the better.

Bryan, Again

With that in mind, everything you hear about Bryan’s story (or any other natural you might hear about) suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.

Here’s how he describes his childhood:

“I grew up literally immersed in the sort of musical culture of Western North Carolina, old-time mountain music. And it was in the house. It was outside the house. It’s what we did.”

His dad played guitar. His grandfather was a fiddler. His mother played piano.

Every Saturday night in the summer there was the Shindig on the Green, an open-air gathering of pickers and dancers in Asheville. The sounds of his native music were almost as ever-present as the sounds of his native language. A rich stream of data, day in and day out.

“Just a complete, steady, nonstop diet of that.”

Attention and data. The two necessary ingredients. Both turned all the way up, for years.

And when Bryan reflects on what was happening during those years, he describes the process about as well as any neuroscientist could:

“Whether I knew I was learning or not, I was paying attention, and I had a sense of how that music should go.”

In those early years, he wasn’t practicing, he wasn’t studying. But, in the background, his brain was undoubtedly busy weaving the complex networks for decoding and understanding the music around him. Building both his “ear” for music and his understanding of how it worked.

By the time he was around eight years old, he understood it so well he could predict what would happen next:

“I had at least a way to predict, or see a certain inevitability. Like, well, if I’m gonna do this, it needs to be this way.”

Comprehension before production. The exact same order in which you learned to speak.

Like the child uttering its first words, by the time Bryan began the project of learning how to control his hands to make music on the guitar, his brain had built complex systems for perceiving and understanding the musical tradition he was learning.

And that machinery never stops growing as long as the conditions remain. Ask Bryan what it’s like now, improvising at the highest level with other master musicians, and here’s what he says:

“To use the language analogy, I know how you’re gonna finish your sentence before you finish it.”

It’s the same predictive model he started building on the floor of his living room at three. Just all grown up. That’s what fluency looks like, in any language.

Why Nobody Sees It

But all of that network building is entirely invisible. Most of the work your brain has done to build the skills and abilities you care about was invisible. It happened through care and attention, but not by specific practice.

And our brain starts doing it day one.

Now take a seven year old who’s been surrounded by music and one who hasn’t, and hand each of them a guitar. One will look like a natural and the other won’t.

Because nobody saw the learning that happened behind the scenes. And we don’t appreciate the broad cognitive skillset that supports musical ability. On the outside, we think it’s just a finger coordination challenge. But that's the most trivial part of it. As Anders Ericsson’s research showed, what separates an expert from an amateur isn't the fingers, it's the richness of the musical model in their head.

Look behind every story of a “natural,” or a “prodigy,” and you’ll find a similar story. Unusual interest and the immersion to feed it.

Almost all of the learning our brain does happens without our knowledge. Others don’t see it. We don’t see it. Or feel it. Our brain builds “gifts” behind the scenes. When they emerge as if from nowhere, we all reasonably assume they must’ve been wired in.

And we end up with the compelling myth of the “natural.”

We mistake differences in inputs and attention for differences in nucleotide sequences.

Erasing The Work

The groundwork only explains the head start. It explains why picking up the guitar felt natural at eight. It eases the friction of learning right where the friction is usually highest.

What it doesn’t explain is how a kid with a good ear became one of the best flatpickers alive. That took thousands of hours. It took a young man who turned down college and decided there was no plan B. It took, in his own words, a nose-to-the-grindstone streak that ran “to a fault.”

None of that came for free. And none of it is what we picture when we call someone a natural. This is the other thing the myth does: it erases all the work. Naturals themselves often bristle at the label for exactly this reason, because it writes the blood, sweat, and tears out of their story.

And Bryan didn’t just put in the hours, he obsessed over how to make those hours count. He learned how to learn.

“To really do what people see at a really high professional level, it is engaging in this kind of stuff. Truly digging back into myself and understanding what my brain is doing... reading books... I wouldn’t be where I am without it.”

Natural Consequences

The problem with that myth, beyond it being wrong, is its consequences. Take the example of music.

You decide to learn an instrument as an adult. You sit down, and none of what Bryan had is there. Your ear doesn’t automatically pick out the chord changes. You don’t know what’s supposed to come next. The cognitive structures for music that reduce the friction don’t exist.

Everything is slow, everything takes effort, and nothing is obvious. You compare your experience with someone for whom it came naturally and you think they got something you didn’t.

But they didn’t get something you didn’t. They built something you haven’t built yet.

And the part of your brain that can build it never goes away. But it needs the right conditions.

In the case of music, we know exactly what those conditions look like, because the recipe is found in the background of every “natural.” Immersion in the music you want to play. Not as background noise, but as something you’re giving your undivided attention because you love it and can’t get enough. Playing along, playing with others, going where the music is. Jumping into every musical opportunity with both feet. Letting your ear feed on the real thing, in quantity, the way a child feeds on speech. The training extends far beyond the practice studio.

Most adults skip straight to the fingers, put in their twenty minutes of drills, and wonder why it feels like pushing a rock uphill. They’re trying to build the last step of the chain first, because it’s the step that’s visible. Do the same, and you’ll starve the Genius of attention and data it needs to build the cognitive machinery that paves the way, and wonder why you’re stuck.

And you’ll think to yourself, “if only I’d been born a natural.”

Now Available for Pre-Order: The Genius and the Impostor

The invisible builder that reverse-engineered your native language and Bryan’s local music is one of the two main characters in my new book, The Genius and the Impostor.

The other main character is the one who all too often shuts the Genius down.

The book is the full story of how extraordinary minds are built from ordinary brains. It comes out August 25, and is now available for pre-order at GeniusAndImpostor.com.

Bryan Sutton is a three-time Grammy and ten-time IBMA guitarist of the year winner. For more than twenty years he’s been a first-call session guitarist in Nashville, which means his playing runs through records by Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, and Doc Watson. He’s also driven home from studio sessions so discouraged that he was convinced he’d never work in the town again.

In this conversation we get into how he built his playing growing up immersed in the mountain music of Western North Carolina, why performing under pressure is a completely separate skill from playing well, and the mental shift he uses to get out of his own way.

To hear the interview, you can watch the video above or if you prefer the audio only version, you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods.

Now Available for Pre-Order: The Genius and the Impostor

The feats of genius we celebrate, whether it’s writing Hamlet, deriving relativity, or improvising a killer flatpicking solo at 150 beats per minute, don’t come from special brains. They come from something that we all share.

In The Genius and the Impostor, learn why and how extraordinary minds are built from ordinary brains.

Now available for pre-order at GeniusAndImpostor.com.

Nelson had already won 5 times. He’d done the work. He had the skills.

But what almost kept him from winning a record-breaking 6th title wasn’t another competitor or a lack of preparation. It was his own body, shaking so hard outside the 2024 final that he couldn’t work out why.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all had times where the pressure of the moment kept us from accessing what we were truly capable of.

The Genius and Impostor framework is the model at the heart of my upcoming book. It explains how extraordinary ability gets built from “ordinary” brains, and why it can desert us at the worst possible moment.

In this episode I map Nelson’s story onto it: how he built a world-class memory from a starting point he describes as completely average, what hijacked him before the 2024 final, and how he found his way back to the most composed performance of his life (the episode is also available in audio format wherever you get your podcasts).

Below is a single page summary of Nelson’s “Genius Arc”.

Nelson Dellis's Genius Arc

519KB ∙ PDF file

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🪕 Banjo Break: “Shady Grove” (demo and tab)

Here’s a simple classic played out of “G modal” tuning (gDGCD, but tuned down to d#A#D#G#A# on this banjo), in both clawhammer and 2-finger thumb lead style.

2 Finger Thumb Lead

Shady Grove 2 Finger Thumb Lead

29.4KB ∙ PDF file

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Audio Demo of Tab:

Clawhammer Version

Shady Grove Clawhammer

29.1KB ∙ PDF file

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Audio Demo of Tab:

You either have a good memory or you don’t.

If you can recite the first 70,030 digits of the number pi, like world record holder Suresh Kumar Sharma, you must be a freak of nature. You must’ve been born with a rare and unusual brain.

This is what most people believe.

For many years, it was what Nelson Dellis believed. But when Nelson saw his grandmother’s memory slowly fading away due to Alzheimer’s disease, he wondered whether that was actually true. If your memory could get worse, could it also get better?

That’s when he discovered that, with training, your memory can improve.

Not by just a little bit. By a lot.

Enough to win memory championships. Enough to recite pi to 70,000 digits. In fact, the only way to achieve those kinds of feats is through training. As he puts it in our conversation, nobody wins a memory competition on a naturally good memory. Nobody.

Through his own training, Nelson has won the USA Memory Championship a record-breaking six times.

I’ve spent the better part of my career arguing that every one of the abilities we chalk up to “natural” gifts is built, and helping people unlock them. Nelson is on a similar mission to show people what they’re actually capable of, and help them get there.

In this episode, he shares how he built a world-class memory, and what it would take for you to build one too.

To hear the interview, you can watch the video above or if you prefer the audio only version, you can listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods!

Related Links:

• Nelson’s Book, Everyday Genius

• Nelson’s Instagram: @nelzor

• Josh’s Instagram: @brainjojosh

🤓 The Genius and the Impostor

The feats of genius we celebrate, whether it’s writing Hamlet, deriving relativity, or memorizing a deck in under 30 seconds, don’t come from special brains. They come from something that we all share.

In The Genius and the Impostor, learn why and how extraordinary minds are built from ordinary brains. It’s also the perfect companion to Nelson’s book, “Everyday Genius.”

Now available for pre-order at GeniusAndImpostor.com.

🪕 Banjo Break: “Wild Mountain Thyme”

We’ve done the brains. Now for the banjos! In the form of a song and tab.

The only thing better than playing and singing on the banjo is playing and singing with my daughter Jules. Here we are playing "Wild Mountain Thyme" (you may know it as "Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?"). See below for the banjo tab.

Below is the clawhammer tab for it, played in double D tuning (same as the video). There’s also an audio demo of just the tab itself below.

Wild Mountain Thyme Tab

94.2KB ∙ PDF file

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Audio Demo of the Tab:

The first is a book…

Introducing The Genius and the Impostor

Ideas have always been the most powerful force in the world.

Which is strange, since an idea isn’t made of anything. How could something made of nothing influence anything at all?

We’ll table that gnarly philosophical question for another day.

What matters is that it's true of the ideas we hold about ourselves, too. What we’re capable of. What we aren’t. Once those harden into place, they’re almost impossible to dislodge. No matter how wrong they are.

Like you, I inherited a set of them early. That we’re each born different in ways that matter. Math brains, music brains, art brains, bird brains. School was for finding out which kind you’d been issued, so you could sort yourself into the proper bin.

I’ve now spent a lifetime in the neurosciences, most of it fixated on the mind, cognition, and intelligence. And I can report that those ideas are - to use the technical term - baloney.

I could keep that to myself. But ideas have consequences. Especially these. Because what we believe we're capable of draws the boundaries of our lives, and most of us have drawn them in the wrong place.

Extraordinary minds are built from ordinary, standard-issue brains. Every one of us comes equipped with the same machinery that makes an extraordinary mind possible.

That’s an idea worth sharing. It’s the one at the heart of my work, and at the heart of my next book, The Genius and the Impostor, out August 25.

I’d love for you to pre-order a copy (my publisher would too). But more than that, it would mean the world to me if you read it.

The second thing to tell you about is a new show…

Introducing The Performance Neurology Podcast

The ideas shared in the book have real, practical consequences. Realizing your potential comes down to two things: how well you tap a lifelong capacity for learning, and how well you can use what you’ve learned when it counts.

I could go on about the neuroscience of why (my idea of a good time!). But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding.

The Performance Neurology podcast brings you the pudding.

Every conversation is these ideas in action: how top performers from all walks of life built their extraordinary minds, and how they learned to perform at their best when it mattered most.

The first intro episode is live now, so you can get a feel for where it’s headed. And this Friday, the first full conversation drops.

My guest for that episode is Nelson Dellis, a six-time U.S. Memory Champion. Nelson can perform feats of memory that make him seem like another species. But he wasn’t born with that ability, he built it.

How to come along

If you’re ready to come along for the full experience, here’s how:

#1: Pre-order the book.

You can learn more about the book and pre-order it at GeniusAndImpostor.com. Pre-orders do more for a book’s reach than almost anything else, so if any of this resonates, it’s the single most helpful thing you can do.

#2: Subscribe to the podcast.

The first episode is live now, and this Friday my conversation with Nelson Dellis drops. Follow the show and it lands in your feed automatically, no remembering required!

Follow on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• or wherever you get your pods!

That’s the two things. Thrilled. Terrified. Grateful you’re here for it.

Josh

Either way, you summon every ounce of courage, throw caution to the wind, and take the plunge.

You make it through. The audience seemed to enjoy it and you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. And then….someone walks up and says, “You sounded great. But you should smile more next time. You looked like you were in pain.”

If you play the banjo, you’ve probably heard some version of this before. I certainly have. In fact, it’s so common it has a name: “banjo face.”

Just when you thought you were already feeling self conscious about everything you could possibly feel self conscious about, the world throws one more thing at you.

And I get it. People hear a banjo making happy, rollicking, joyful noises, and they expect to see a face making happy, rollicking, joyful expressions. They expect the face and the music to match.

But, if you’ve been accused of having banjo face, here’s what I want you to know: the problem is not you.

The problem is our well-meaning but ill-informed spectator whose advice rests on two common misconceptions about what’s actually happening when a human being tries to smile while playing a musical instrument.

Let’s tackle them one at a time…

Misconception 1: Smiling While Playing Is Easy

Back in the nineteenth century, neurologists noticed something strange about the way smiling could break down after brain damage.

Some patients couldn’t lift one side of their mouth when you asked them to smile. Tell them to grin, and half the face stayed frozen. But tell them a joke, and the whole face lit up, both sides, no problem at all.

Other patients showed the opposite pattern. They could grin on command just fine. But when something genuinely delighted them, the smile never came.

What was going on here?

It meant there wasn’t one pathway for smiling in the brain. There were two.

The first kind of smile is the one you produce on purpose. You decide to lift the corners of your mouth, and up they go. That signal starts in the frontal lobe, the conscious command center, then travels down through the brainstem and out to the muscles of your face. This is the smile you flash for the camera.

The second kind of smile you don’t decide to do at all. It starts with a feeling. Joy, amusement, delight. That feeling rises up from deeper, older structures in the brain and reaches the face by an entirely different route, lighting up a different set of nerves and a different set of muscles.

Two smiles. Two pathways. Only one of them begins with a genuine feeling, and you and I can tell them apart.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of a fake smile. The mouth does roughly the right thing, but the eyes don’t join in. And while you may not be able to explain why, there’s a part of you that knows. That’s your brain reading the difference between a signal sent from the frontal lobe and a signal sent by genuine feeling.

Which leads to an inconvenient fact: the only way to produce a genuine smile is to genuinely feel like smiling.

You can’t fake your way into the real thing. Your conscious mind simply doesn’t have the keys to that machinery. You can order the voluntary pathway around all day long, and you’ll get a voluntary smile, the kind everyone can spot from across the room.

Now, one might think that faking a smile while playing the banjo would be as simple as flipping the switch that voluntary pathway.

But you’d be wrong.

That’s because your conscious mind, the part that activates that voluntary smile, can only do one thing at a time. It’s a slow machine that processes in single file. To smile on purpose while playing, you have to keep toggling your attention back and forth between the smiling and the playing.

Most banjo players discover this the first time they try to fix banjo face. They decide to smile mid-tune, and the instant they do, things start going off the rails.

It’s the neurological equivalent of running two phone calls down one line.

After such an experience, most players silently vow to never try that again, and accept banjo face as their fate. After all, playing with banjo face is better than not being able to play at all.

At this point, I know what some of you might be thinking. Why not just crank out a genuine smile? If one is having a rollicking good time picking their banjo, shouldn’t that good feeling just trip the genuine pathway and provide an ear-to-ear grin for free?

Well that brings us to the second misconception…

Misconception 2: The Feeling While Playing Is Happiness

Here’s the thing about playing the banjo, or any instrument. It’s hard!

To produce sounds from a banjo that a human ear will tolerate, let alone enjoy, you have to wriggle the fingers of one hand in precise sequences at roughly eight wriggles per second, each one landing inside a window measured in milliseconds. It also requires the simultaneous wriggling of the fingers of the other hand to fret the strings at precisely the right moments.

For anyone but the most heavily seasoned veteran, pulling this off demands intense concentration. Every ounce of attention you have goes into the task.

So what is the player actually feeling up there?

Not the simple, sunny happiness the audience hears in the music. The audience gets to feel that. The audience isn’t doing anything.

If the player is feeling something, that feeling is flow.

Flow is what happens when a task is hard enough to demand everything you’ve got, but not so hard that you drown.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave this state its name. Flow is one of the most rewarding experiences a human being can have. It’s the whole reason people pour thousands of hours into a skill in the first place. The skill is just the price of admission to the state.

Make no mistake, flow feels amazing. It’s intensely positive. It just isn’t the kind of feeling that lifts the corners of your mouth.

So now both doors to smiling are shut.

The voluntary smile wrecks your playing. The genuine smile never fires, because the emotion driving you isn’t the one that produces it.

That furrowed, faraway, half-constipated look isn’t the face of suffering. It’s the face of a brain at work.

“High On A Mountain” - Demo and Tab

For those of you looking to practice your banjo face, here’s a demo and tab of Ola Belle Reed’s classic “High On A Mountain,” presented in both clawhammer (as Old Belle did) and 3 finger style.

“High On A Mountain” - Clawhammer

“High On A Mountain” - 3 Finger

Note: the version I play in the videos is in “standard G” tuning, as above, but tuned down (to the key of E).

NOTE: I’m surveying people about their experiences performing under pressure (music, sports, life, etc.). I’d love to hear from you - click here to take the 2-minute quiz.

You’ve done this a thousand times. You know it cold.

And then the moment arrives. The room is watching, or the recording light is on, or someone you respect is listening.

And, suddenly, you feel like an inept beginner. As if you’ve stepped into someone else’s body.

Your hands won’t cooperate. Your mind is freaking the hell out. It feels like every eyeball on the planet is judging you, and the verdict is not good. Who is this impostor, they must be thinking.

It’s the kind of experience you never want to have again.

Naturally, you chalk it up to a lack of preparation. You just weren’t as good as you thought you were. You should have practiced harder. Or different.

But the thing is, you did prepare. You put in the work. It wasn’t that the skills weren’t there.

It was that, somehow, when you needed them the most, they vanished.

Two figure skaters at the 2026 Winter Olympics just showed us both sides of this story in the most vivid way possible. And what their contrasting performances reveal is not what most people think.

Two Skaters, One Question

Ilia Malinin is one of the most gifted figure skaters who has ever lived. The first person to land a quad axel in competition, a jump so difficult that until recently it was considered physically impossible.

He had been undefeated internationally since late 2023. According to the expert commentators, a gold medal was as inevitable as death and taxes.

And then the unthinkable happened.

He fell twice. He made errors on jumps he has landed thousands of times. When the verdict from the judges came, he dropped from first place to eighth, out of medal contention.

Afterward, Malinin was searingly honest about what happened. “I just felt like all the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head,” he said. “So many negative thoughts just flooded in there. And I just did not handle it.”

He had felt ready. He had felt confident. But in his own words: “I didn’t understand how much the pressure was really going to get to me.”

Then, a week later, Alysa Liu took the ice for the women’s free skate.

She was not the favorite. She had retired from skating at 16, burned out and struggling, and only returned two years later on her own terms.

In her final skate, she delivered the performance of her life. A performance that earned a gold medal, the first for an American woman in singles figure skating in over two decades.

Afterward, she described what it felt like: “I was peak happiness when I was out there on the ice. Nothing could bring me higher than that.”

The knee jerk narrative is that one of them choked and the other didn’t.

But that’s an oversimplification that misses what’s actually interesting. It ignores and trivializes the complexity of what they’re trying to pull off, and all that they must overcome in order to do it.

Malinin is not weak. Liu is not simply tough.

Something specific happened in their brains. And what separates them is not talent, not preparation, not mental toughness.

The Self Is the Problem

We’re all familiar with the voice in our head. Our internal narrator. The one whose sole obsession is you.

It’s job is to tell the story of who you are. To yourself and to the rest of that world.

Though it can feel like the totality of who you are, the reality it is that voice is only the tiniest fraction. One little brain network amongst thousands.

The self-network, which sits in the prefrontal cortex, has a narrow job. It’s the public relations arm of your conscious mind. Under ordinary circumstances it does that job without causing much trouble.

The problems arise when it detects a threat to the story it’s been telling to you and the rest of the world. Because, in its eyes, a threat to your identity is a threat to your survival. If your identity dies, you die.

So if that identity is "musician" or "great student" or "world's best figure skater," any scenario where that identity is on the line becomes a life-or-death situation. Playing in your first jam session and facing an approaching grizzly bear trigger the same alarm system.

First, it sounds the alarm. Heart rate spikes, hands shake, muscles tense.

And second, it tries to take over the controls. At the exact moment when you need your hard-won automatic skills firing on all cylinders, the self module steps in and says I got this one. This is too important to leave to the amateurs.

But there’s only one problem: your conscious mind doesn’t actually know how to do anything.

It can narrate. It can evaluate. It can worry.

But it cannot play a piece of music, land a quad axel, or give a coherent speech. It is an inept beginner. A backseat driver who’s never operated a motor vehicle, suddenly taking the wheel. Predictably, you crash and burn.

Listen to Malinin: “It’s just a lot on you, just so many eyes, so much attention.” That’s self consciousness, perfectly described.

At the moment when the self needed to exit the scene, it took center stage.

The Practice Trap

The default response to performing badly under pressure is to practice more. More discipline, more hours, more repetition.

And it sounds right. It feels like the responsible answer.

There’s even a wise-sounding adage that goes “Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.”

But it misses what’s actually causing the breakdown in this scenario.

Practice builds the automatic system. It trains the fast, fluid, skilled part of the brain that produces great performance. That part is essential.

But it has nothing to do with choking.

Malinin’s skills were literally the best in the world. That much is unquestioned. He had built the necessary neural software for a gold medal performance.

But all the practice in the world doesn’t teach the self-module to get out of the way.

When the Self Goes Quiet

During her short program, Liu looked into the stands and found her four younger siblings, her father, and her best friend. She didn’t look away. “I performed to the people,” she later explained. “They’re right there, so I performed to them specifically.”

When a reporter suggested her family might be a distraction, her response was immediate: “My family is not a distraction. They’re the only reason why I’m here.”

What was Liu focusing on during her performance? Or, importantly, what was she not focused on.

Her self.

Liu’s attention was directed outward. Toward the people she was performing for. Toward the music. Toward the story she was telling on the ice. And when attention goes outward like that, the self-module has nothing to grab onto. It goes quiet. The automatic system runs uninterrupted.

After winning gold, Liu held up her medal and said something remarkable: “I don’t need this. But what I needed was a stage, and I got that. So I was all good, no matter what.”

This is the part of Liu’s story people can’t stop talking about. How could an Olympian not care about winning a medal? How could she not care about the result? Isn’t that the whole point of it all?

For most athletes, it is. And that's exactly why choking is so common. When you care about the result, everything becomes about you. Am I good enough? Will they judge me? What happens if I fail? The self network is fully engaged, and silencing it becomes nearly impossible. Athletes and performers spend entire careers devising tricks and rituals to neutralize its influence.

Liu didn’t stop caring. She cared enormously. She cried after her short program. She screamed after her free skate. But she redirected what she cared about. Not the score. Not the judgment. The people. The music. The stage itself. “My goal is just to do my programs and share my story,” she said. “Whether I beat them or not is not my goal.”

What people see as extraordinary about Liu is her mindset. It feels like a paradox. But it may be one of the most important lessons in all of human performance: we do our best work when we stop making it about ourselves, and turn our attention to what truly matters.

(Related: If you haven’t taken the 2-minute survey on your own experiences performing under pressure, click here to do so)

I’d “discovered” Doc perhaps two years before then. I’d never heard anyone play guitar like that.

But the albums I had were decades old, recorded when Doc was a much younger man.

Going into the concert, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Describing it as mind blowing sounds cliche. But that’s what it was.

Not only did he still sound just like he did on his albums, he was even better than I realized.

He could play all the classics at the same blistering tempos, just as clean, with the unmistakable timing and tone that makes the hair on your neck stand up.

But, in addition, he could improvise one perfectly composed break after another. And it seemed he could do so forever.

He was in total command creatively, technically, musically. I’d have been blown away by a musician of any age with those skills.

But, if popular culture was to be believed, Doc was far past his “prime.” According to the story of aging, his brain should not have been capable of the lightning fast transmission required to pick, create, and entertain at the speed of sound.

I love moments like these. Moments where you realize that something you thought to be an inviolable law of the universe is shown to be wrong.

In this case, it was the story we’d told about aging and the brain.

The story about a relentless “aging process” that causes an inevitable and irreversible deterioration in our skills and cognitive abilities over time.

Of course, that story didn’t appear out of thin air. It was based on the fact that many times skills do deteriorate with age.

The question then becomes: what determines when that does and doesn’t happen? If that’s what happens to most, why didn’t it happen to Doc?

Answering those kinds of questions is why we do science.

In 1996, scientists Anders Ericsson and Ralf Th. Krampe designed a study to find out.

They recruited 48 pianists and divided them into four groups: young experts, older experts, young amateurs, and older amateurs. The young musicians averaged about 25 years old, the older ones about 60.

Then they tested them on a series of music-specific skills like rapid bimanual coordination and musical interpretation.

Compared to the younger amateurs, the older amateurs had declined.

But the older experts? Their performance equaled that of the young experts, and was superior to that of the young amateurs. Better than musicians half their age.

And what was the single best predictor of whether skills were maintained or declined? Practice time.

The best predictor of their music-related abilities wasn’t age, but how much they’d practiced. The musicians who were still practicing 10 hours per week or more were the ones who’d maintained the skills of their youth.

In other words, the fact that Doc never stopped playing and performing is why he was able to continue playing and performing. He kept feeding his brain what it needed to keep those circuits in peak condition.

When expert musicians reduce or stop the amount of time they spend playing and performing, their skills decline. Many times, that’s an intentional choice. Priorities change.

That’s why skills tend to decline with age. Not because the brain has more miles on it, but because the brain is no longer receiving what it needs to maintain those specific neural pathways and motor programs.

The point is that 'aging' is a scapegoat. The skills we maintain through continued deliberate practice can remain remarkably intact. If there are abilities you care about preserving, know that you have far more say in the matter than you've been led to believe.

I also made a video version featuring Martha Argerich doing the “impossible” at 83:

NOTE: If you’re a member of Club Curiosity, click here to go to club headquarters!

The free posts will remain the main event. This is an optional add-on for those who want a deeper layer and a more communal way to learn.

Club Curiosity is a book-centered learning community: we’ll read together, discuss each book in an ongoing private chat, meet live for deeper conversations (with recordings), and use chapter-based quizzes to help the ideas actually stick.

We’ll be kicking off Club Curiosity with a deep dive into my book, “Anyone Can Play Music.” At its core, it’s a book about how to learn, which I consider the single most important life skill.

So it’s a fitting place to begin, I think!

Join Club Curiosity

Club Curiosity: FAQ

What is Club Curiosity?

Club Curiosity is a community for people who are as passionate about lifelong learning as I am.

I believe learning is our greatest superpower, and I don’t think it’s something we “finish.” I think lifelong learning is the key to a long life well lived.

It’s how you become smarter and wiser with age, and the single best way to keep the brain sharp and reduce the risk of cognitive decline.

Why create a paid option now?

Because enough of you have asked, and because I finally have a version of “paid support” that feels aligned with what I’m trying to do here: deepen curiosity, protect attention, and help people actually retain and use what they’re learning.

Will the free content change?

No. The vast majority of what I post will remain free.

I’m not interested in turning free writing into a teaser for the “real” thing. Club Curiosity is meant to be an optional deeper layer, not a gate.

Who is Club Curiosity for?

It’s for the people who:

• love to learn (and want to keep that flame alive),

• feel like the modern stream of information is both thrilling and hard to digest,

• want their learning to actually stick, and

• like the idea of a community of like-minded people to help keep attention pointed toward what matters.

No obligation whatsoever. If you’re a learning junkie like me, you’ll probably love it.

What will Club Curiosity be centered around?

Books.

We’ll read one book at a time around a theme, and we’ll have live meetups to discuss it (and those will be recorded so you can access them later if you can’t attend live).

How will the meetups work?

We’ll set a simple cadence around each book. The meetups are meant to be the opposite of stressful: a place to think out loud, connect ideas, and enjoy the process of learning with other people who actually like doing this.

Where do the conversations happen between meetups?

In our private Substack Chat. We’ll have ongoing threads for each book, so you can drop in thoughts and questions as you go, instead of saving everything for a single meeting.

What’s the deal with the quizzes?

Each book we read will come with a series of quizzes, organized by chapter (or sections of chapters).

These aren’t “tests.” They’re tools to make the information stick.

One of the main problems I face, and I’m guessing many of you do too, is that we’re consuming more valuable information than ever: books, podcasts, conversations, interviews, courses.

Some of it is genuinely life-changing. And yet so much of it gets forgotten as we move on to the next thing.

That’s the double-edged sword of the information age.

It’s the greatest time in human history to be curious, and also the hardest time to make the information stick.

The role of the quizzes is to help with that “make it stick” problem, by giving you a structured way to:

1. retain what you’re learning, and

2. translate it into something usable, rather than something you briefly agreed with and then lost in the stream.

(NOTE: you’ll receive a link to your full set of quizzes for “Anyone Can Play Music” right after you join).

Join Club Curiosity

Is this going to feel like hustle culture or self-optimization?

No!

I’m not much for hustle culture, and I’m not an “optimizer.” I think that approach often backfires, because it turns learning into one more thing you “should” be doing, which is a proven way to kill curiosity.

I want this to feel like a community that supports your natural rhythms, helps protect your attention in a modern sea of distractions, and makes learning feel like what it should be: deeply gratifying.

You don’t even need a “reason” to learn. Learning is its own reward, and unlike so many things competing for our attention, the gratification from learning tends to last. It deepens and compounds.

How many books will we cover?

I’m thinking around four books per year.

Not because we can’t do more, but because the goal is depth not volume. It’s giving ideas the time they need to work their way deep into our brains and actually change something.

What’s the first book?

We’ll start with my book: Anyone Can Play Music.

It’s technically about learning music, but it’s really about how learning works, period, and why understanding how to learn is the most important skill.

A lot of my neuroscience work is centered around learning, its benefits, and how to get better at it. That includes how we can use the incredible array of resources we now have at our disposal, including how I personally use AI to take my learning further (which is definitely going to be an evolving subject).

(NOTE: if you elect to become a “Curiosity Patron,” I’ll send you a signed copy of the book.)

If you’d like to join

If you’ve been enjoying the free posts, keep reading them. I love having you here.

But if you want a deeper layer, a slower pace, a book-centered community, and a way to help good ideas actually stick, you can opt in for a paid subscription and join Club Curiosity.

No pressure, no guilt, no obligation. Just an invitation.

Join Club Curiosity

It’s not as Instagram-worthy as running a marathon or scaling a mountain peak. You won’t be taking any selfies after achieving it.

But it might be the hardest thing you do all year.

My suggestion? Change your mind.

We live in the age of the bubble. And bubbles are not only bad for our politics and our culture, they’re bad for our brains.

Why Changing Your Mind Is So Hard

When you were a kid, changing your mind was a full time job. Your world was routinely rocked by new revelations:

There is no Santa Claus.

Pro wrestling is fake.

Gum doesn’t take seven years to digest.

The moon isn’t actually following you home.

Your dad isn’t actually the strongest man alive.

The grown-ups understand the tax code.

You reveled in these updates. Every discarded belief was proof of your growing maturity and intellect.

Then, at some point, the script flipped. We started acting like certainty was a virtue and changing our minds was a sign weakness.

There are deep reasons for this.

First is the biological cost. Our long-held beliefs live in well-worn neural pathways. Carving a new path requires a massive metabolic cost that the brain is loath to pay. Our current beliefs offer the path of least cognitive resistance.

Second is the social cost. Many of our beliefs are tethered to the groups we belong to, and we have a primal instinct for belonging. For most of human history, changing a core belief meant risking rejection and exile.

To make matters worse, technology has turned these ancient instincts against us for profit. Meta figured this out to the tune of trillions of dollars by feeding us confirmation instead of information. And ChatGPT saw usage bottom out when it stopped telling users how smart they were.

We’ve built technologies that feed us exactly what we already believe because our brain eats it up.

Cognitive Calcification Is Optional

But that instinct that may have helped build trust in yesterday’s tribal world dulls our minds today. Worse, it almost surely accelerates our cognitive decline.

Just as a sedentary body accelerates physical aging, a sedentary mind hastens cognitive decline.

The cognitive calcification that tends to occur with age isn’t something that happens to us, but a product of what we do with our brains as we get older. Along every dimension, we tend to change less with age: less education, less complex skill learning, more reliance on habits, and so on.

Why does this matter at the cellular level?

Because your neurons don’t know the difference between learning the violin and changing your mind about politics.

Both require your brain to rewire. And that rewiring—plasticity—is the very definition of a youthful brain. Cognitive stagnation doesn’t just keep you from getting smarter or wiser. It accelerates your brain’s demise.

Research shows that the more open minded you are, the more likely you are to retain your marbles as you age.

One study tracking thousands of adults over 20 years found that people who scored higher on “openness to experience” performed better on memory and reasoning tests two decades later. Being open minded means being willing to change your mind. And changing your mind keeps your brain young.

The stakes extend beyond your own neurons. When individual brains stop changing, societies stop functioning. Our collective unwillingness to change our minds plays directly into the hands of forces that thrive on polarization and discord.

These days, the best predictor of someone’s belief system isn’t careful reasoning but which groups they belong to. We believe what’s necessary to stay in the “tribe,” then marshal our justifications after the fact.

The Examined Life

It is a mathematical certainty that you are currently wrong about many things. So am I. Things you feel absolutely certain about right now.

Every generation throughout human history could look back at prior ones and marvel at their ignorance.

There were times when most people were absolutely certain that the earth was flat, that witches caused thunderstorms, that demons caused epilepsy, and that child labor was perfectly acceptable. Today, we can’t fathom how people could have believed such things.

Which means future generations will do exactly this to us.

Charles Sidney Burwell, Dean of Harvard Medical School, once told students: “Half of what we are going to teach you is wrong and our problem is that we don’t know which half.”

If Harvard medical students can’t escape this reality, neither can we. But that shouldn’t be cause for despair, because it provides us endless opportunities to exercise our minds.

This is the core philosophy behind the scientific method. Its aim isn't to find evidence that supports a belief, but evidence that refutes it. Science progresses not by confirming what we know, but by discarding what we don't. It is the fastest way to get closer to the truth, and it requires the courage to kill your favorite ideas.

It’s an approach that has worked out extraordinarily well for humanity.

Of course, I’m really just rehashing Socrates’s strongly worded advice from 2,400 years ago that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

It’s an extreme take, for sure. But he probably figured he needed it to get people’s attention. If our march towards cognitive calcification is the biological default, then humans back then would’ve been just as likely to fall in line. He recognized the personal and societal costs of allowing the mind to harden into a state of permanent, ignorant certainty.

How To Change Your Mind

So changing our mind is the goal.

Now we need a plan.

The first step in changing our mind is to acknowledge the possibility that, unsettling as it may be, we might be wrong about some things.

The second is to scrutinize our beliefs like a scientist.

One of the best ways is to “steel man” a belief you disagree with. Take a polarizing topic where you hold a strong opinion and imagine you have to defend the opposing position in a high-stakes debate. Build the strongest case you can for the view you currently disagree with.

If we’re living an examined life in the way Socrates intended, we should be able to do this for all of our beliefs. Especially those we hold most strongly.

If you’re experiencing apprehension or even revulsion at the thought of doing this, well…that is the point. That discomfort is the very cognitive inertia we’re trying to overcome. It is the metabolic cost of carving new neural pathways and the psychological cost of defying the "tribe."

Diversifying Your Feed

One simple step is to broaden your news sources. Sites like Tangle and Ground News present issues from across the political spectrum, making it easy to see how different groups frame the same facts.

Through this process, you might find your original belief has grown more nuanced. Or, you might actually change your mind. Either way, you win.

Stay curious. Stay plastic. Choose curiosity over certainty. And dare to be wrong.

Are you in?

That’s the process research shows expert musicians use when playing music. More precisely:

Step 1: AUDIATE

• Imagine the sound you want to make, or “audiate.” This step sets the goal.

Step 2: MAP

• Transform that imagined sound into a motor program. Your brain must convert what you’re hearing internally into a sequence of hand movements.

Step 3: EXECUTE

• Make the movements of your hands to generate the music.

Step 4: EVALUATE

• Compare what you hear against what you intended. Notice any gap. Adjust.

Audiate, Map, Execute, Evaluate.

Then repeat—thousands of times, across years.

Notice what’s absent from this sequence: there’s no step that says “look at a screen or page to know what to play.”

The process begins and ends in sound.

The Invisible Architecture

To many people, an expert musician is simply someone with skilled hands—the ability to move quickly and precisely to play the right notes. But that’s not where expertise lives.

The expertise is in their musical cognition: the neural pathways they’ve built for mentally manipulating musical information.

One network for audiation. Another for mapping sound to movement. Another for evaluating what they’ve played against what they intended.

These networks are task-specific, deeply trained, and entirely invisible.

This invisibility is part of why musical expertise is so easy to misunderstand. When you watch an expert play, what you see are the hands.

What you don’t see is the cognitive architecture that’s directing them—the years of training that built pathways for hearing, imagining, and manipulating music mentally. The hands are just the visible output of a much deeper system.

The special sauce of expertise isn’t in the movements themselves. It’s in the plan that was crafted for moving them.

A plan that’s composed in the mind of the musician.

And the pathways that compose that plan weren’t just always there. They were built through practice. Which means you must practice in a way that develops them.

Where Practice Goes Wrong

This is where so many players go astray.

It’s entirely possible to spend years “practicing” without developing any of these skills. How? By bypassing the entire process.

When you learn a song purely from tab (or in any other written notation), the sequence becomes: look at symbols, decode the instructions, move your hands.

You might learn the song, but you haven’t practiced audiation because you never had to imagine the sound first.

You haven’t practiced mapping because you went from visual symbols to movements, not from sound to movements.

You haven’t practiced evaluation because you were checking your hands against the page, not your ears against your intention.

The source of the music is the crucial difference. Does the music originate in your mind, or on the page?

When tab comes first, the entire cognitive sequence that builds musical cognition is bypassed. You never build the special sauce, and then wonder why you don’t have it.

This is why so many people practice diligently and then feel frustrated by their lack of progress. It has nothing to do with talent, and everything to do with training.

Every song you learn is an opportunity to practice all of these skills, but it’s not guaranteed.

In the recent workshop learning “Shady Grove”, we moved through exactly this process. We listened, we audiated, we mapped sound to movement, we evaluated and refined. No tab required—not because tab is forbidden, but because we didn’t need it.

The music was in our ears, then in our minds, then in our hands. That’s the sequence that builds the cognitive networks you need. We never left the realm of sound.

(RELATED: click here to check out that workshop and the 4-step process)

If you want to use tab, use it to support this process rather than replace it. Specifically, use it if needed to help complete Step 2, the mapping of the sound in your mind to the necessary movements of the hands. All of the other steps should stay the same.

If you find yourself staring at tab the entire time you’re playing, on the other hand, you’re not practicing music. You’re practicing symbol decoding.

(Note: One reason lead sheets are such a great visual aid is that they can’t replace the fluency-building process, they can only support it).

As a general rule: the more time you spend in the realm of sound, the faster you’ll progress.

The less time you spend looking at a page or screen, the more you’re building the cognitive skills that actually matter (as I mentioned, you’ll get the most out of the workshop if you only use your ears and never look at the video).

This doesn’t mean tab has no place. It means tab should serve the music in your mind and not as a substitute for it.

The music comes first. Always.

If you want to go deeper into the science of molding your musical mind, check out my book Anyone Can Play Music.

These kind of musical workouts are adaptive in that they scale to your current level, which means you can use them more than once (until you feel you’ve mastered all the elements).

Feel free to ask questions in the comments!

Thanks all!

Josh

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Here’s the version I’ll be teaching:

We’ll learn the song step-by-step, from the ground up, by ear—beginning with the simplest form and building from there.

Even if you’re just getting started with the banjo, you should find it worth your while.

I’ll be teaching it in the 2 finger thumb lead style (as shown above). If you currently play another style (like clawhammer), and haven’t given thumb lead a try before, this is a perfect song for you to test the waters.

If that sounds like a good time, I hope to “see” you there!

You should receive an email when the session begins, but you can also click on this link to access it.

The People Have Spoken!

My last post on whether bluegrass is too fast for its own good clearly struck a chord with many of you!

As of this moment, over 700 of you voted in the poll, with more than 80% saying bluegrass is either sometimes or always too fast for your tastes (while 15% of you speed junkies said you’re always ready for it).

Clearly there’s a healthy appetite for some mellower material...

Thanks to all who voted and commented—it sparked a wonderful conversation, one I’ll continue in a future post.

(NOTE: if you missed it, click here to read “Is Bluegrass To Fast”—and be sure to check out the comments section as well for some thoughtful responses, then leave one of your own!).

Speaking of polls, here’s another one (don’t worry, your responses are non-binding):

(NOTE: there’s a poll question for you at the end—I’d love to know your thoughts!)

It’s a question that grows out of something we’ve explored before, which is the relationship between tempo and the brain.

As we’ve learned, your brain has preferred tempos for moving and for listening. There’s a pace you naturally gravitate toward when you’re walking, clapping, or tapping (your Spontaneous Motor Tempo, which we explored in this post).

And there’s a pace your brain prefers for perceiving rhythmic sounds, which most of the time means music. Researchers call this your Preferred Perceptual Tempo, or PPT (more on that one here).

Each of us has our own PPT, but humans cluster narrowly around a particular value.

That tempo shows up in popular music. When researchers analyze the tempos of popular music, the most common tempo lands right around 100 bpm. That number matches almost exactly what PPT experiments predict.

That is no coincidence. Music is our way of vibrating air to tickle our perceptual circuits in all the right ways, and tempo is one of the ingredients we use to maximize the tickling.

There’s an infinite number of tempos we could make music, yet we’ve settled on a tiny sliver of that spectrum.

Because that’s what the brain likes.

Which brings us to the strange case of bluegrass.

The Outlier

Bluegrass was a genre dreamed up by Bill Monroe, which is why he’s called the “Father of Bluegrass.” He created the rules and expectations.

One of those expectations is around tempo. Take his Bluegrass Breakdown, a Greatest Hits compilation, as an illustrative example. The album has 12 songs, with tempos ranging from a low of 101 bpm (“Can You Hear Me Calling”) to a high of 163 (“Shady Grove”).

Here’s the full “breakdown”:

• Can You Hear Me Calling—101

• Blue Moon of Kentucky—105 (128 for the 4:4 speed up)

• Footprints in the Snow—116

• Nine Pound Hammer—118

• Uncle pen—119

• Prisoner’s Song—125

• Muleskinner Blues—130

• I Saw the Light—146

• Shenandoah—153

• Orange Blossom Special—157

• Bluegrass Breakdown—162

• Shady Grove—163

The average tempo across all 12? 135 bpms.

That’s way above the average person’s PPT for listening to music.

But…

If we look at the tempos of our most popular songs, we find the biggest spike averages around 100 bpm. However, there’s another smaller spike around 140 bpm.

What’s that about?

Dance music, that’s what!

When it comes to music that we enjoy for synchronizing our bodily gyrations to, we like things a bit peppier.

So while bluegrass tempos are well beyond what people prefer for listening, they’re squarely aligned with our preferred tempo for dancing.

Those of you who know the origins of bluegrass may see where this is going. Bluegrass began as Monroe’s attempt to commercialize the Southern mountain music he grew up with, and much of that music was for dancing—a fusion of dance music from Europe and African traditions into an American form.

Part of Monroe’s reformulation included adding instrumental solos. Solos added some variety to the listening experience and enhanced the live entertainment value.

But he didn’t change the tempos. In some cases, he sped them up.

Shady Grove: A Case Study

Here’s an example. This is the Appalachian folk song “Shady Grove.” It’s a song for singing, not for dancing.

It’s performed here by Jean Ritchie, who is singing and playing the mountain dulcimer. Ritchie was born in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and learned hundreds of folk songs in the traditional way. Monroe grew up just a few counties over, so they likely shared the same musical heritage.

Her tempo? 100 bpm.

Now here’s Monroe’s rendition of the same song:

His version clocks in at a blistering 163 bpm.

He took a song normally played at listening tempos and cranked it up to the top end of dancing tempos.

Why did Monroe choose to do this? Why were faster tempos such a crucial feature?

I’m speculating, but I suspect it was partly to amp up the entertainment value for live performance. For Monroe, bluegrass was part musical experience and part spectacle (and in that era, which was not too far removed from the days of Vaudeville, it was common for musicians to also be entertainers).

Part of the entertainment value is marveling at technical abilities—people playing so many notes so fast. In the same way you’re entertained by a juggler or a tightrope walker.

For that to be impressive, the music needs to feel fast. You have to notice that the tempo is speedier than what you’re used to appreciate the technical feat.

That works well for live performance.

But it doesn’t translate to the listening experience.

And so you end up with tempos that are often much faster than what the typical brain likes. When we’re that far outside our perceptual comfort zone, the music becomes less intelligible. And listening starts to feel like work.

The Auctioneer Problem

Consider conversations. When we speak to each other, our brain has to analyze and decode the sound it receives. And there’s a pace that’s comfortable—speech that’s too slow or too fast requires extra effort.

Because we want to be understood, most of us talk at a pace that’s comfortable for our conversation partner’s brain.

When I was little, I loved going to the cattle auction with my grandfather becuase I loved listening to the auctioneer. I could barely understand a word he was saying, but that hardly mattered. I couldn’t get over how someone could talk so fast! I found it hugely entertaining.

For the average listener, bluegrass is like the auctioneer experience. Entertaining, even though you can’t fully understand it.

Now, brains are adaptable. With enough exposure, we can learn to parse music that’s outside our perceptual sweet spot. That’s the nature of an acquired taste.

Listen to the fast-talking auctioneer enough times and you’ll start to understand what he’s saying. Listen to bluegrass enough times and you’ll start to capture more of what’s happening.

But that requires patience and time. To acquire a taste—to build the necessary perceptual adaptations—you need a reason to persist.

The bitterness of coffee and beer is outside of a typical brain’s perceptual sweet spot. That’s why hardly anyone likes them at first sip.

But coffee and beer happen to come bundled with psychoactive substances—the caffeine and the alcohol keep you coming back. Over time, your brain adapts and voila: you enjoy not only the aftereffects but the taste, too!

Bluegrass has no such chemical hook.

The Consequences

Has this limited the popularity and growth of bluegrass? Almost certainly.

Consider bluegrass versus country. Both are recent splits from the same musical tree, but the difference in popularity is astronomical.

At this time, a top-10 country artist generates about 25 to 50 times the number of streams and touring revenue as a top-10 bluegrass musician (this does not include any band that happens to have a banjo or mandolin player, as Spotify would lead us to believe).

Consider also that Bill Monroe’s biggest hit—by a wide margin—was “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Clocking in at a tempo of 105 bpm it was also one of his slowest songs.

I think this also explains the makeup of the bluegrass fan base. Fans of bluegrass are twice as likely to be musicians themselves (and play bluegrass, specifically).

Those who aren’t musicians tend to be rabid fans —i.e., a disproportionately passionate and devoted bunch. Bluegrass has a strong culture and community which has its own draw apart from the music.

In both cases, then, there are additional incentives at play that keep people listening long enough to acquire the taste.

The Chillgrass Project: An On-Ramp

I happen to love a lot of the traditional southern mountain music that bluegrass pulls from. And I especially love that it’s a tradition of music being made by “regular” people—a reminder that we were once all musicians.

Unfortunately, many equate mountain music with bluegrass. As in: that instrumental music with banjos and fiddles that people play really fast.

Not the best format for first impressions. Kind of like an auctioneer reciting Shakespeare. Too fast to appreciate the beauty underneath.

This has made it less accessible to both listeners and performers.

There’s no on-ramp for either group. It’s just sink or swim, and most people sink.

I’d like there to be many more on ramps. So that listeners can listen to versions they can relate to. So aspiring players don’t have to log 5,000 hours of practice before feeling any sense of accomplishment.

Plus, more players need permission not to chase a tempo target out of a sense of obligation—tempos that were designed to delight the eyes and not the ears. If that sounds like you, then you have my full permission to play at the speeds that sound best to you!

Providing more on-ramps for listeners and players was the idea behind the Chillgrass Project. What’s Chillgrass? It’s like bluegrass, but more chill.

Put another way: it’s traditional music played at tempos that more brains prefer for listening.

A finally…a poll! Let me know your thoughts on the topic (and feel free to elaborate by leaving a comment!).

(The Chillgrass Project volumes 1 and 2 are now available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube, and other streaming platforms).

If you want to skip my neuro-philosophical musings about the tune and skip straight to the tab, then just scroll to the bottom. If musings are your thing (right on!), then keep on reading!

The Origin Story for “Elk River Blues”

Unlike most of the fiddle tunes that enjoy widespread circulation in old-time music circles, we happen to know both who wrote this one and why.

In this case, the composer was West Virginia fiddler Ernie Carpenter (click here to listen to him playing it).

Carpenter grew up near the Elk River in Braxton Co., West Virginia. He witnessed the planning and construction of the Sutton Dam by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the river during the 1950s and 1960s.

That work resulted in the flooding of his boyhood home and the surrounding area, and that loss is what ultimately led him to write the tune.

Here he is explaining the tune’s origin story:

I was the last person out of there. I went ahead then and tore the old place down and brought it up here. Part of it’s in this house…I was sittin’ here one day, an’ I had the blues. I reckon as bad as anybody could, thinkin’ about my old homeplace up on the Elk River. I started sawin’ on the fiddle an’ that’s what I came up with.

“Elk River Blues” was his way of processing feelings of profound loss and longing. And those emotions come through loud and clear. You can feel the pain. Which I think in no small measure explains why so many people like it.

The question is…why?

Why do we voluntarily play and listen to music that makes us feel this way? Over and over again.

After all, the goal of life is the pursuit of happiness, right?

The Paradox of Pleasurable Sadness

These sorts of contradictions are a gold mine for understanding ourselves.

Because what they often reflect is not a true contradiction, but a misunderstanding. They suggest that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think.

In this case, the misunderstanding centers around our own feelings, what they’re for, and how we categorize them. In trying to resolve the contradiction, we deepen our understanding of ourselves.

In Portuguese, there’s a word that refers to the feeling we get from a tune like “Elk River Blues”: saudade.

Saudade is a state of pleasurable sadness, often associated with nostalgic longing.

It’s the ache you feel listening to a certain song from your past, or remembering a place you can never return to, or thinking about who you were at another time in your life.

Saudade is an integral part of Portuguese culture (especially if their tour guides are to be believed!). There’s even an entire genre of music, Fado, that’s dedicated to making you feel this way. It also permeates popular music from the late 1970s and early 80s, in my view (I’m looking at you, Alan Parsons).

The closest we can get to the meaning of saudade in English are phrases like “sweet melancholy” or “bittersweet longing.” In these terms, there’s an acknowledgement of a flavor of sadness that feels good.

But how? What’s going on here?

Why We Listen To Music That Hurts

Psychologists have put forth several theories to explain the phenomenon of pleasurable sadness, including:

• Safe exploration - We’re drawn to melancholy in controlled contexts so that we can feel profound emotions without real threat. Like watching a horror or war movie, we can explore scary things and feelings while remaining fundamentally secure. Music here is like emotional training wheels.

• Meaning making - Bittersweet emotions make us feel that our lives have significance. The ache of saudade signals that something in our life was meaningful enough to miss. The reflection that it triggers helps us place those events into our life story.

• Tribal cohesion - Longing for the past or for absent loved ones may have kept our ancestors bonded to their social groups and motivated to maintain relationships across distance. Natural selection wired in the capacity for saudade because it kept families and communities connected.

• Emotional healing - When we recall a painful memory, it becomes temporarily malleable. Revisiting that memory in a safe, soothing context can update the emotional charge attached to it. The memory gets “re-saved” with less intensity or new associations so that it’s less traumatic.

These are all plausible, and of course they aren’t mutually exclusive. There may be truth in all of them.

Your Brain on Saudade

Another way to figure out what’s going on is to stick a brain inside a scanner while it’s experiencing these feelings.

What do you see when you do that?

Quite a lot, as it turns out! When you listen to music that moves you deeply, it activates distributed networks across your entire brain. Areas associated with a wide range of functions.

Specifically, researchers observe activity in the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens (your brain’s pleasure and reward system), the amygdala and limbic structures (raw emotional processing), the hippocampus (autobiographical memory), the medial prefrontal cortex (self-referential thinking and meaning-making), and even motor areas despite your sitting still.

These disparate systems don’t normally fire together like this in the course of everyday life. The ability to elicit such widespread cortical activity is but one of the many things that makes music so unique and wondrous.

But what does all that activity indicate about what’s happening in the brain? We can’t know for sure, but we can make some educated speculations.

The Awe Connection

In aggregate, this pattern of brain activation resembles what’s observed during experiences of awe (which means that music is literally awesome…but you already knew that).

There’s a growing body of research around the phenomenon of awe. It’s a distinct and complex emotion, and one we find intensely pleasurable.

Awe is typically triggered by scenarios where we appreciate vastness. Of time, of space. Where our focus shifts far beyond ourselves.

That outward shift in attention often provides a welcome change for those of us who, whether we want to or not, spend much of our time focused inward. Our sense of self melts into an experience of pure wonder, sometimes overwhelm, smallness, and transcendence.

But what’s especially intriguing is that the data suggests that, when we’re listening to emotionally charged music, the self remains. That’s because the default mode network (DMN) tends to become more active during emotional music, and the DMN is strongly associated with states of mind-wandering and self-reflection. DMN activation is the neural signature of our attention directed inward.

In short, we’re seeing brain activity that’s associated with both a sense of awe and of self-reflection. We’re simultaneously experiencing a sense of something grand beyond ourselves while still maintaining a sense of self. As if we’re a part of that vastness.

It’s as if we aren’t losing ourselves, but grounding the self in something bigger. Or perhaps redefining our concept of self altogether.

Deep Belonging

Why might we enjoy that feeling so much?

We don’t like feeling isolated. We don’t like feeling separate. These are intensely negative emotions with deep evolutionary roots.

Social isolation activates the same brain regions as physical pain, like the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula. To our brains, isolation is a major threat to survival because, for our evolutionary ancestors, it was. The pain of isolation is our brain saying “find some friends fast or you’re toast.”

Yet the concept of self naturally invites in a feeling of separateness. It’s baked into the standard definition. There is us, and there is the world that’s separate from us.

But we are, of course, of the world and fully integrated into it. Our self concept is a useful fiction created by our brain.

We might be able to appreciate the illusion of separateness intellectually, but feeling the connection is another story.

And maybe that’s what’s happening when we experience saudade. Maybe that’s what the imaging data is showing us. It’s showing us experiencing deep connection.

That would explain why we enjoy it so much. Because if isolation is one of the most negative feelings we can experience, an intense belonging to anything and everything should be one of the best.

In that case, we don’t pursue saudade despite the pain, but because it’s one of our most reliable paths out of isolation. Music becomes a portal from separation to belonging.

And now, for those of you who’d like to use your banjo to evoke a bit of saudade, here’s how to play it:

Banjo Tabs and Audio Demos for “Elk River Blues”

Click below to download the lead sheet and tabs for “Elk River Blues.”

Elk River Blues Tabs

189KB ∙ PDF file

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“Elk River Blues”: Lead Sheet

Here is the lead sheet for “Elk River Blues.” This is the tune stripped down to its basic blueprint of melody and chords so that you can embellish as you see fit!

“Elk River Blues”: Clawhammer Version

Here’s one way to take that basic blueprint and transform it into clawhammer banjo:

And here’s what that clawhammer version looks like in tab:

“Elk River Blues”: 3 Finger Version

Here’s one way to take that basic blueprint and transform it into 3 finger banjo:

And here’s what that 3 finger version looks like in tab:

So if you’d previously considered grabbing a copy but thought 43 of my words per penny felt exorbitant (a defensible position), you can now enjoy a far more palatable 200! These are 21st century words at 20th century prices, folks.

Grab a copy today so you can ponder the neuroscience of learning while basking in your frugality (see image below for details).

I believe it’ll revert back to its regular price in the next day or two, so act fast while supplies last…or something like that!

Here’s what some nice people have had to say about the book:

“The best presentation of a well-organized, practical method that can help the reader develop into a better musician that I have ever encountered.”—Dan Miller, Bluegrass Unlimited

“In this mind-bending guide, neuroscientist and physician Josh Turknett reveals how anyone can hack their brain to learn music at any age. With the precision of a neurosurgeon and the soul of a banjo player, Turknett shows how imperfection can be beautiful, struggles are stepping stones, and your best days of learning may still lie ahead. Whether you’re 15 or 85, this book hands you the neural keys to unlock your inner musician—and help you with any kind of learning. A masterclass in brain plasticity disguised as a music lesson.”—Barbara Oakley, PhD, author of A Mind for Numbers

“This book should be a vital part of everyone’s musical learning experience. You can be a better musician, and what’s in this book will ensure that.”—Bryan Sutton, 10-time IBMA Guitar Player of the Year and Grammy Award winner

But what about listening to patterns of sounds?

Do we also have a preferred tempo for listening to music? If so, why might that be, and what determines it?

The short answer is yes, our brain does indeed prefer certain tempos for listening. The formal name for this is our “Preferred Perceptual Tempo.”

Preferred Perceptual Tempo (PPT) is the rate of a series of sounds that a person judges to be neither too fast nor too slow, but “just right.”

Like SMT, we each have our own preferred tempo, shaped by a mix of factors like genetics, age, and musical experiences. But as a species, we tend to cluster in the same neighborhood. We may not land on the exact same tempo, but we all more or less agree on what’s too fast and what’s too slow.

On average, adults like their regularly occurring acoustic stimuli to be about 600 ms apart. Some like it a bit slower (700 ms), others a bit faster (500 ms). That corresponds to roughly 84–120 beats per minute (BPM), centered near a satisfyingly round 100 BPM.

Tempos In Popular Music

In reality, the science on PPT is just confirming what humans have known intuitively for as long as we’ve been banging on logs. After all, music is essentially an effort to hack our auditory perception to stir emotions and spark movement.

And we’ve been hacking our brains with music for millennia.

That’s why, out of an infinite range of possible tempos, the music we actually make and love falls into a surprisingly narrow band.

The data on our popular music supports the findings from the lab:

• A 2015 study of the 200 songs in year-end Billboard Top 40 from 2005 to 2009 revealed an average tempo of 99.9 BPM.

• A recent analysis of Spotify’s Global Weekly Top 200 charts showed that the 90-99 BPM tempo range contained the most songs.

And yet, we don’t always listen to music that lives in our comfy PPT zone. In fact, the most streamed songs in that Spotify dataset clocked in at an average of 144 BPM.

Why are we sometimes drawn to tempos that fall outside our perceptual comfort zone?

To Listen or To Dance?

Well, one big clue in that Spotify data is that the majority of songs in the 140+ BPM range came from a single genre: hip-hop.

And that’s no accident, as it highlights what was likely music’s original role. Throughout human history, music has served two primary purposes:

1. Music for listening

2. Music for dancing

In these two roles, what we want from the beat is slightly different.

Music That “Moves” You

When we’re listening for pleasure, we love the ease with which our brain locks onto the groove. Music is patterned sound, and much of the joy it brings comes from recognizing those patterns and successfully predicting what’s next.

When pattern identification and prediction happens smoothly, it feels effortless and rewarding. When it doesn’t, it starts to sound like noise.

One of those patterns is tempo. And PPT is the tempo where our brain can make sense of what it hears with the least effort.

Furthermore, when pattern detection happens on autopilot, it frees cognitive resources to attend to the nuances that enhance music’s emotional weight. The music we love most for listening “moves” us figuratively, and movement is more likely when pattern detection is happening with ease.

Once the tempo climbs past about 120 BPM, that effortless perception starts to slip away. Pattern detection gets harder until it falls apart altogether.

So, in general, the tempos that we prefer for listening to music are those in which our brain is able to identify and predict patterns with the least amount of effort.

Music That Moves You

So what’s the big difference between music for dancing compared to music for listening?

Movement! We move to one and not the other.

But here’s the super interesting part: the best dance music doesn't just give us a beat to move to, it gives us a beat that literally makes us move.

EEG studies show that neurons fire most strongly in response to rhythmic frequencies between 90 and 150 BPM, with a peak around 120 BPM. And it’s not just that our neurons are choosing to respond most to those frequencies, it’s that those frequencies appear to be driving neuronal activity through the phenomenon of resonance.

How does resonance work? Think about pushing someone on a swing. The timing of your push matters, right?

If you push at random times, your effort will likely be wasted, and may well slow the swing down.

But if you push at exactly the right moment, in sync with the swing’s natural rhythm, you’ll maximize the impact of your push. That’s because the swing has a natural frequency at which it “wants” to move.

Our brains work the same way. When a rhythm lands right around 2 Hz (120 BPM), the motor system effortlessly clicks into gear. The further away from the sweet spot, the harder it has to work, until it gives up trying to synchronize at all.

What this also means is that your brain isn’t just passively transferring the beat into consciousness, it’s creating it. Your brain actively sculpts the incoming sounds, amplifying some pulses and ignoring others, bending perception to make it easier to move. That’s why some songs make you nod, tap, or full-on dance without you even noticing it happening.

Because of its influence on brain activity, the music we love most for dancing moves us literally.

So, in general, the tempos that we prefer for dancing are those in which our brain is able to synchronize its movements with the least amount of effort.

Here’s a visual summary of the differing effects of listening tempos on the brain and how it shapes the kind of music we make (revealing a sweet spot where tempo is neurologically tailored for listening or dancing).

Summary

• Preferred Perceptual Tempo (roughly 80 to 120 BPM) reflects our brain’s sweet spot for identifying and predicting patterns in sound with the least effort.

• Dance tempos (roughly 90–150 BPM) reflect the sweet spot for synchronizing movement with the least effort.

• Popular music clusters here because these are the tempos where brain and body meet with the least resistance.

• Higher tempos aren’t about easy listening but about making you move.

Years ago there was a gentleman in his 80s who used to post recordings regularly on the Banjo Hangout. I wish I could recall his name. It might’ve been Dan, so that’s what I’ll use.

Dan had only been playing banjo for a few years, which means he’d picked it up in his late 70s. In his recordings, he would play and sing.

He’d invariably strike an apologetic tone with posts, as if he felt they weren’t good enough to share.

But his music was more than just good enough to share. It was fantastic.

His playing was tasteful and perfectly timed. It was nothing fancy, and it was just right.

His untrained, gravelly voice, with the warm and weathered patina of a well-worn catcher’s mitt, was the perfect accompaniment.

I wasn’t the only one who loved his music. Everyone did. His posts were always met with lavish praise. Many of us suggested he record an album, which he dismissed as lunacy.

I got the feeling he never quite believed that our feedback was genuine. That we weren’t just trying to make an old guy feel good.

I was reminded of Dan recently when listening to Sam Shackleton’s “Lone Prairie” for the first time.

His rendition of this classic folk song has recently resonated across social media, where his music is finding an eager new audience (which I suspect this has played no small part in the many requests I’ve received for a tutorial on it).

Shackleton’s style, like Dan’s, is simple and direct. Just the glorious, unadorned sound of a banjo and a human voice.

As its recent surge in popularity reinforces, it’s a sound that will never get old, and perhaps is especially welcome in this time when so many are starved for authenticity and connection.

Learn To Play “Lone Prairie”

Now let’s build up a fingerstyle and clawhammer version from the ground up.

In addition to being beginner-friendly from a technical standpoint, this song is also great for those who are just starting to develop their ear. So, I strongly encourage you to use the audio clips to try to work through this process with your ears as much as possible, consulting the tabs as needed.

We’ll start by creating the musical blueprint (melody, chords, rhythm). Once that’s in place we’ll transform it into a banjo song using the techniques of clawhammer and fingerstyle.

Step 1: Find the Chords

Let’s begin by working out the chord progression.

First, you may notice that my version, like Shackleton’s, sounds low. Indeed, my banjo is tuned down 4 half steps from Standard G tuning, putting it in the key of Eb/D#. So, if you want to match those versions, you’d tune your banjo strings down to d#A#D#GA#.

For the sake of instruction, I’m going to teach and demonstrate it here in Standard G tuning (gDGBD), and in the key of G Major.

With our banjos in tune, we’re ready to find the chords. The chords you’ll need for this song are G Major (the I chord), D Major (the V chord), and E minor (the vi chord).

Here’s an audio walk through of the chord progression:

Step 2: Find The Melody

Now that we’ve worked out the chords, let’s locate the melody notes on the banjo.

Here’s the audio for it. See if you can find the notes by ear first before scrolling down to the tab for the melody (hint: You’ll only need 5 notes, which are the open 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strings, and the 2nd frets of the 3rd and 4th string).

Now that we have all of the elements in our musical blueprint, we can represent them with a Banjo Lead Sheet:

Step 3: Banjo-fy It

Now comes the fun part, where we run our tune through the banjoficationator!

To do so, we’ll take our melody and add in the conventions of our chosen technique, be that fingerstyle or clawhammer.

Shackleton’s version is in 2 finger thumb lead style, so I’ll review that first.

A simple way to transform the melody into that style, as he does, is to fill the open spaces with pinches on the 1st and 5th strings (in thumb lead style the index finger is typically used to pick the 1st string).

Here’s how that sounds:

And here’s the tab for it (our original melody notes are enlarged):

If you wanted to add a bit of rhythmic variety, you can alternate between a pinch and a roll when filling in the spaces, as in:

Clawhammerized Version

And for the clawhammer version, instead of using a pinch, we’ll just fill in the spaces with a brush thumb, providing the classic “bum ditty” rhythm.

Here’s how the clawhammer version sounds:

And here’s the tab for that (once again with the melody notes enlarged).

In my versions below, I’ve added a few minor embellishments, but kept it pretty simple overall.

“Lone Prairie” - Fingerstyle Version

“Lone Prairie” - Clawhammer Version

I’ve said many times that there’s no correlation between how challenging a tune is to play and how well it will connect with listeners (and much easier to go wrong by doing too much than too little!). This song and arrangement is yet another great example of that.

Click below to download the Banjo LEAD SHEET, LYRICS, and TABS for “Lone Prairie.”

Lone Prairie Tabs And Lyrics

259KB ∙ PDF file

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