Duane writes:

Pete, I have one of your jamming DVD's (A Guide for Newcomers and Closet Pickers). Great Stuff. I'm about to buy the others.

Do you have banjo tab for the tunes on your DVDs? I've only been playing for a couple of years now and I've found it difficult to work up breaks for some of the tunes. Also, some of the tabs I've located are highly ornamented and stylized (Sitting on Top of the World by Shelor, I think, especially).

Duane,

You need to come to my banjo camp, where one of the main orders of business is to learn to create your own solos based on melodies of songs. Learning a lot of these from tab is not going to get you "there". At some point you have to learn to write your own paragraph, not just memorize other people's.

That said, you'll be glad to know that I'm getting ready to put out a DVD of backup, most of it taken from the jamming DVDs. I also intend to tab a number of the breaks. This stuff won't be out for several months at the soonest, though, so best get to work writing some of your own paragraphs, so to speak! Pete Wernick