I attended two beginner jams so far at banjo camp and in one they did finally play a song I knew. I couldn’t keep up but I knew it. The rest I just sort of sit dumbfounded and lost. I have no idea what any of the chords sound like. What to play. They would ask what tune people want and what song and I’m just lost. I simply don’t get how people hear this and join in. To me it’s the absolute most uncomfortable and I can’t wait until it’s over. I wind up muting the strings and just pretjng to play song after song. The concept of just knowing and joining in is so completely alien I just zone out and wait for the next song hoping it’s something I’ve heard of. I seriously can’t hear these chord changes at all. I mean I know the chords. I have them all memorized but trying to guess which one is being played is just so completely alien to me. I have love the parts of learning new songs and the parts on melody and technique were a blast but I feel like everyone just know ms every song that’s named and just rolls in on the 1-2-3-4 and rocks it.

I just feel like everyone is juggling bowling balls and I’m unsure how to even tell how to pick one up.

I feel like the beginner is bum ditty which I have or techniques which I she then there is just this gulf of just start playing and I just can’t hear it at all. It’s very very frustrating. I’ve picked up two tunes here and could get them and the complexity of them but the concept of playing just by hearing something I haven’t heard before is just so alien. Every song I jst make up like I’m playing. I just assume that there are x number of chords and I have to guess which one might come next on ever song.

Goodness knows what I’m doing.
I’m still very new to the five string and still finding my way after a couple of years on and off.
I’ve started playing by plucking the fifth string down with my thumb then plucking up on the first with the middle finger followed by a strum.
What if any style is that??
Confused!

This week’s Tune Of The Week is a modern composition by Jay Ungar: “The Wizard’s Walk”. A few weeks ago, another Hangout user requested a tab for this tune, which prompted me to look this tune up and work out how to play it. It’s a three part tune, and quite complex sounding, but very memorable.
It was written by Jay Ungar and appears on his 1997 album with Molly Mason “The Lover’s Waltz”.

I contacted Jay to check if he was happy for the tune to be used here, and he happily agreed. He also provided some background on the inspiration for the tune to share:

“You asked how the tune came to be. I’ve written many tunes over the years, and they tend to arrive in different ways. Some begin with a spark of inspiration, then take shape through hours, days, or even weeks of refining and rewriting. Others arrive almost fully formed, as if they’d always existed. “The Wizard’s Walk” was one of those.
Although “The Wizard’s Walk” first came to me decades ago, in the mid-1980s, I still remember the moment vividly. I was playing fiddle while gazing out the large window of my office in West Hurley, New York—a room that has since become the recording studio of my daughter, Ruth Ungar, and my son-in-law, Mike Merenda. Sensing right away that this was a tune worth preserving, I switched on my cassette recorder to capture it. Titles don’t always come easily to me, but in this case, the name arrived the very same day as the melody itself.

A summer or two later, my wife Molly and I, and my pre-teen daughter Ruth, were at a CDSS dance camp at Pinewoods in eastern Massachusetts. While Molly and I were teaching a workshop, Ruth choreographed a contra dance that fit “The Wizard’s Walk” perfectly. That evening, caller Bob Dalsemer invited her to call the dance, and it was an instant hit.”

Other online versions
I found one banjo video, by Tyler Andal and Sterling Abernathy, featuring some great clawhammer playing.

There are a lot of videos online of people playing the tune on fiddle. It seems to have been picked up widely by contradance and Irish fiddlers. Some of these start off very slow and dramatic then speed up to a very quick pace.

The Wizard's Walk - Day 234 - 366 Days of Fiddle Tunes

Wizard's Walk (Jay Ungar)

Jacie Sites plays Wizards Walk

 

Playing the tune
You can find music notation here:

The Wizard's Walk on folk tune finder

The Wizard’s Walk (reel) on The Session

I have read that this tune is also included in Volume 1 of the Portland Collection, if you have acces to that.

Here’s a tab and video of my arrangement. The main features are:
• In the key of E minor
• Standard G tuning (gDGBD)
• Three parts plus a short coda
• The second part can be played as a regular bum-ditty but it’s fun to try to get it to syncopate like the fiddle versions, which ends up sounding a bit flamenco-ish
• The third part starts with a descending circle of fifths chord sequence (a bit like the start of “Hotel California”). Then, near the end, its hits a diminished chord – not something you encounter every day playing clawhammer tunes!

I hope you enjoy finding out more about this tune and playing it.