I mostly play old time and bluegrass music. Particularly in old time and fiddle songs, the songs have a fairly rigid and repetitious structure. That’s not to say players don’t do interesting things with it, but unless a song is intentionally crooked, the structure of the song remains the same throughout.
A typical structure is AABB. That is, play the “A part” twice, play the “B part” twice, and repeat.
As an example, here’s a clip of Soldier’s Joy off the famous Will the Circle be Unbroken album:
If you’re just learning the song, it’s useful to just about any instrument to know what key it’s in and what the chords are for the song. There are various sites that tend to have this information, some better than others. I tend to bookmark the ones that are good and look there first.
For old time, TaterJoes.com is a resource I’ve used countless times. They’ve got PDF’s of a ton of songs that old time players tend to play. (Irish players, you know about The Session surely.) Here’s Soldier’s Joy:
That’s in “tab” rather than sheet music which is nice for me as I prefer it. I can read music very slowly but I can read tab quickly. So that’s handy, but notice it’s missing the chords. A lot of the songs on Tater Joe’s actually do have chords in the tabs (or the sheet music, which they also offer under the fiddle section) but clearly not all.
On a song like Soldier’s Joy, even an amateur like myself can sort out the chords, but some songs are awfully tricky and have what I’d consider weird changes or they happen quickly enough that I miss them. If you’d like to be shown the chords, you’re looking elsewhere.
A great resource for old time chords is Strum Machine. Here’s Soldier’s Joy there.
Perfect! That’s super useful for the guitar player of course, but it’s really useful for everyone. That’s telling the bass player where it’s going. For me as the banjo player — if I for sure know the current chord — I’m able to fake the melody or do some other form of backup if I know the proper chord.
But notice that big ol’ blue ▶️ play button there! Strum Machine isn’t just for looking at the chords, it will play them for you. No melodies here, this is entirely playing backup audio so you can play or sing along with it, most likely learning the melody and harmony parts. Tater Joe’s has MIDI output of the songs for melody help, but I find them a little too weird to be helpful. Probably better to just find an actual recording of the song to listen to.
What you hear when you kick off the song on Strum Machine is real instrument recordings playing the chords present. It’s all done programmatically. This isn’t a one-off recording of Soldier’s Joy, it’s just the chords arranged in this pattern and then turned into sound via the Web Audio API. Here’s a recording of Soldier’s Joy with the settings dialed to a way that’s appealing to me:
So play that song (which is a paid feature, by the way, there is a free trial) and you’ll hear a guitar playing chords, a mandolin “chopping”, and even a bass playing notes. It’s like a really solid steady backup band for you play along with. It’s a hell of a lot better than a metronome!
Because it’s all programmatic, you can quite easily punch in your own songs for the machine to run. I plunked out this old Paul Simon song to play along with the other day:
Note the interface is just littered with features.
- I can change the key (transpose)
- I can have it count in when I start, or not, and how much, and how it sounds
- I can change the speed (BPM)
- I can have it repeat forever or repeat X times then stop
- I can have it speed up as it repeats
- I can line it up with other songs to play back to back (medley)
- I can group the songs into my own lists
- I can fork (edit) any existing song to put in my own changes
And there are a ton more features, all of which I find quite interesting and tasteful. See the slashes (/) in the output above? That’s not the default, that’s my own preference to not see repeated chords on the charts.
My favorite niche feature is that the sound that the “fake” instruments play is customizable even on a song-by-song basis. For instance, you can adjust the volumes of the different instruments. A very fancy feature is that you can change the guitar style — different guitar patterns might feel better on different songs or you just prefer a certain style for playing over.
I’m glad I took a deeper look at this app after hearing about it at jams. The first few times I used it, I just thought of it as a chord reference site. Useful still, but meh. Worse, the default login system is one of those “we’ll email you a code!” things, which is not my favorite especially when you have to do it every time you pop open the site on a mobile device. I recently saw you can just set a password and use that (better, even better would be passkeys). And there is also native apps for both mobile and desktop, so you basically just stay logged in forever that way, which is very ideal.
I’ve been practicing with it a lot lately and it’s extremely helpful. I think it helps me get the song right a heck of a lot quicker than playing to the void.