Best banjo books for beginners

Buy the Hal Leonard Banjo Method if you have a teacher, and Banjo For Dummies if you do not. That is an unusual recommendation for us to make and it reflects something real about this instrument: the banjo is disproportionately bought by adults, on impulse, with no lessons lined up — and most banjo instruction is written as though somebody is standing there to answer questions. The For Dummies#ad book is the only one here that deals with choosing and tuning the instrument before it deals with playing it, which is the order an impulse buyer actually needs.

Every pick states its Starter Path band, and we have not played any of them — the method is on how we pick. Authors, arrangers, page counts and ISBNs come from the publishers’ own pages, cited at the bottom.

The fifth string, which is why a banjo book has to start earlier than you think

A five-string banjo has a short extra string running from the fifth fret to a peg on the side of the neck. It is a drone: it is not fretted in ordinary playing, it rings as a constant high note woven through the picking patterns, and it is the reason a banjo sounds like a banjo rather than like a bright guitar.

It also means nothing transfers cleanly. The tuning is open G rather than anything a guitarist knows, the right hand uses two fingerpicks and a thumbpick in patterns with no guitar equivalent, and the drone sits in the middle of the chord rather than at the top or bottom. A guitarist who picks up a banjo is a beginner, which is worth knowing before buying a book that assumes otherwise.

Pick your right hand before you pick your book

This is the decision that determines whether a banjo book is the right one, and most people make it by accident.

Bluegrass, or Scruggs-style, is three-finger picking with fingerpicks, fast and rolling, and it is what almost everybody means when they say banjo. It is what all three books here teach or assume.

Clawhammer is older, played with the back of the fingernail striking downward and no picks at all, and it suits song accompaniment and old-time fiddle tunes. It is not harder, it is different, and a bluegrass method will not teach it.

If the sound in your head is Foggy Mountain Breakdown, you want bluegrass. If it is an old-time string band or a singer accompanying themselves, look for a clawhammer book specifically — none of these three is one.

The picks

The Hal Leonard Banjo Method, Book 1#ad is the cheapest real banjo method in print. Hal Leonard publishes the 2nd Edition at 64 pages, by Will Schmid with arrangements by Mac Robertson and Robbie Clement, specifically for five-string banjo — so the fifth string and the open G tuning are treated as the subject rather than as a footnote. Buy this if somebody is teaching you, or you have used a Hal Leonard method before and like the format. Skip it if you need audio and video: this printing has none, and the deluxe edition that does costs roughly twice as much.

Banjo For Dummies#ad is the pick for the self-teacher. It includes online video and audio instruction, and — the part that matters — it spends real space on the instrument itself: what to buy, how to tune it, how the thing is set up. An adult who ordered a banjo without ever having touched one has questions that a method book does not consider questions, and this is the book that answers them. Buy this if there is no teacher and no band. Skip it if you want something shaped to sit on a music stand — it is a book you read as much as play from. Note also that Bluegrass Banjo For Dummies is a separate, narrower title.

Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo#ad is in the overspend band, and the label is about timing rather than quality. Hal Leonard publishes the Revised and Enhanced Edition at 200 pages in tab — more material than the other two combined, from the player the style is named after. It is also several times the price of the Hal Leonard method and assumes you can already play. Buy this if the player has the basic rolls and wants the primary source. Skip it if they are in their first months, which is the clearest example on this page of buying the right book at the wrong time.

What we did not list, and why

Mel Bay’s You Can Teach Yourself Banjo. A reasonable self-teaching book that loses to the For Dummies title on one specific point: it has no video, and for a right-hand technique with no guitar equivalent, watching somebody do it is worth more than another page of description.

Pete Seeger’s How to Play the 5-String Banjo. A historically important book and a frustrating first purchase — it is idiosyncratic, strongest on clawhammer and frailing, and organized nothing like a modern method.

The Hal Leonard deluxe beginner edition. Same method with audio and video added at roughly double the price. A fair buy; we have listed the cheap printing because the For Dummies book already covers the want-media case better and costs less than the deluxe.

Tenor banjo books. A different instrument — four strings, no drone, used in Irish and Dixieland music. Hal Leonard publishes a separate tenor method, and a five-string book is the wrong one for it.

Before the book: is the banjo playable?

Worth a note, because banjos are bought on impulse more than any instrument we cover.

A banjo has more adjustable parts than a guitar: a tensioned head, a bridge that is not glued down and simply stands under string pressure, a tailpiece and a coordinator rod. A cheap banjo arriving with a slack head and a badly placed bridge sounds dull and plays hard, and no book fixes that. If a new banjo sounds like a thud rather than a ring, the head tension and the bridge position are the first two things to look at — our page on beginner banjos covers what to expect at each price.