You Can Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

So maybe now is a good time to give a progress report from someone who took up learning the banjo on her own at 50 years of age with no previous musical experience (except singing in the church choir many years ago). I hope this helps to be a motivator for you if you ever get a notion that learning to play the banjo after "50" is impossible. Well, it's NOT!

My first challenge was putting the finger picks on. Okay, let me see a show of hands for those of you who put the picks on backwards the first time. Come on, you know who you are. My husband thought they made really great back scratchers.

The first song I learned was "Boil That Cabbage Down." I must have played that song at least a thousand times before I felt like I could get it up to a speed past slow.

Then a little later on came learning chord progression. As we all know when we get older the brain cells aren't as plentiful as they were when we were younger. It took me a little while to get my brain to learn what "up and down the neck" meant. When I was working on "up the neck" my brain kept thinking "down the neck" and vice versa. So I decided that was a little to much for it to handle and to not think about that part just yet because I was about to give it a real workout by tackling the 4-fingered chords. Now, that took a little doing and it's still a work in progress.

The bottom line is you can learn to play the banjo at any age with a good instructor and/or good instructional teaching materials even if you don't have as many brain cells as you use to.

I'm a firm believer in setting personal goals and doing my best to reach them no matter what obstacles get in the way. But my main goal is to have fun on this banjo learning journey. Life is to short not to have fun in whatever we do. And we all should pat ourselves on the back for the progress we make each step of the way while moving forward to whatever goal we set.

Keep on pickn' and having fun!

Angie (experienced "middle-aged newbie")