Moving melody to the thumb — a clawhammer banjo thought

Here’s a thought for you to think about: can you move melody notes onto the thumb? That’s something I think about a lot, and experiment with frequently: how I can rearrange a melody and drop-thumb a note instead of down-stroking it, or even hammering-on/pulling-off that note.

This is fairly common in clawhammer playing I think, although usually approached as: can I render this complex melody with the clawhammer style? (i.e. melodic clawhammer playing) What I present in this video is rarer/weirder than that, because the goal here isn't to render complex melodies, it's to rearrange/modify simple ones.

And the key right-hand technique here is one that doesn't seem to be a part of most melodic players’ repertoire: drop-thumbing onto the first string, which you can think of as a “single-string” clawhammer style. (Funnily enough, this single-string style is the opposite of 3-finger single-stringing, which is focused on playing lots of notes in quick succession. This style is about doing percussive things on one note.)

I'd love to know if any of you have experimented with these techniques, either the standard drop-thumbing melody notes or the stranger drop-thumbing melody notes on the first string. If so, please comment below.

Happy holidays, and thanks for watching!

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00:00 “Swing & Turn (Jubilee)“
01:39 Introductory remarks
02:12 Single-string exercise no. 1
03:10 Rhythmic single-string example
04:10 How to single-string
05:21 Some example in-use
05:39 Swing & Turn talk-through
07:00 Home Sweet Home talk-through
08:30 Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine talk-through
10:35 Recapitulation, into rambling
11:41 Unconscious noodling
12:11 Exercises, discussed philosophically
13:23 Exercises become noodling