Teach Yourself Bluegrass Banjo Book/Online Audio [With CD]

This is a good book. Regardless of the other reviews, I didn't think the vocals were as bad as I expected. The book provides good instruction. As a guitar player, the transition was still tricky. Make sure you go slow and don't try to go through the book too fast. For the songs and exercises, start with a slow tempo to get the finger picking pattern, then speed up.

This is a good book, but is a little bit more advanced than someone would need with no previous playing experience. I found myself getting frustrated easily trying to keep up with the book. A better book for the true beginner would be Banjo Primer, by Geoff Hohwald. I have reviewed Banjo Primer in detail over there. Tony Trischka's book will be of value to me at some point because it contains an excellent collection of songs, but I doubt I will look at it until I've got a month or two of lessons underneath my belt.

Using this book I learnt to play a pretty fast and deft version of bluegrass yardstick Cripple Creek within four months, practicing for less than an hour a day - so it must work! The first two months weren't much fun, slogging thorough a hundred different versions of the same two tunes. But it picked up half way through, when real music was introduced and it became gratifying to play and improve. One thing I should mention, everyone's been complaining that this CD's got (awful) vocals and guitar tracks masking the banjo (the very reason they bought it). This is true, it's pretty distracting. However, I ripped my version to MP3 to listen to in on my PC, and to allow me to loop small pieces easily etc (much easier than scanning on a CD player by the way). Anyway, I found out that most tracks have the banjo playing through one speaker and the guitar/vocals playing through the other. Just tip the balance of the speakers 100 % left and you've got isolated banjo track. I suppose it works for a normal hi-fi too. At least that worked for the copy of the book I bought in a music shop in Australia.