Banjo: Chords for a Country Arrangement

The chord reference for this chair. Pick a root, then any of 62 qualities, and get the shapes plus the thing a chord chart never tells you: what this chair does with the chord once the arrangement is running.

The banjo chair carries a three-finger roll behind the singer — a steady stream of picked notes through the chord, filling the eighths a two-feel leaves empty. The left hand holds the shape below and the right hand never strums it: thumb, index and middle pick through its strings one at a time, which is why a banjo chord reads as motion rather than as a block.

Every shape below is drawn for GDGBD, 5 strings, with the open shapes first and the movable ones up the neck after them, and each one plays back so you can hear it before it goes on a record.