The Fredösphere

Virtuoso performers dazzle us with their high-speed playing, their pyrotechnics of technique.  This can happen with a player of almost any kind of instrument, but there is something especially hypnotic and mystifying about banjo players.  Unlike other performers who work up a mighty sweat, a banjo player seems preternaturally calm.  If you watch the picking hand, the gestures seem impossibly few, given the torrent of notes gushing forth.

A banjo player's picking gesture is tiny in comparison with , for example, a fiddler's bowing, but that doesn't explain the whole effect, not by a long shot.  Banjos (along with other fretted stringed instruments) allow for certain left-hand techniques, including hammer-ons and pull-offs, that allow the player to produce notes at approximately double the rate that the right hand picks them.  This is what produces that illusion that the music is magically -- even maybe diabolically -- busier than the effort ought to allow.

So now you know how to play a fretted instrument with dazzling virtuosity.  Well, one of the ways.  There is another:  you could sell your soul to the devil.  Which only makes sense, particularly if you are a banjo player.

Whichever method you choose, you'll want to become a banjo virtuoso as soon as possible.  It most definitely has its rewards.