In the Pines Lesson Discussion 6/2025
In my opinion, this is an insanely useful lesson! I’ve combined these two words because it’s really incredibly useful to my playing and yet insanely scary getting started. Like most banjo tunes I’ve tackled in the last 10 years, they seem like they’re gonna be impossible the day I start working on one, but a few days later, it starts to feel like it might actually happen!

Massive Content

This lesson has everything but the kitchen sink in it, but you’ll have to give some serious thought to how you’re gonna tackle it without getting frustrated. Mike does his normal thing walking you through every little detail which is great but to get through this you’re gonna have to stand back about 10,000 feet and think each day about how you should approach it. It’s full three pages of tab. I bludgeoned my way through this for about a week, first just the memorization of the melody, forward rolls backward rolls, licks all over the neck. It was driving me nuts. The whole thing reminded me once again that I’m not an Earl Scruggs and I’m not Ron Stewart, but they both make great contributions to my playing. First question was, “can I just get through the first page of this thing without looking at the tab?”

Vamping
What I probably should’ve done first is ask myself, “what are the patterns? What patterns do I see in this song?” This is a great lesson with a lot of visible patterns starting with the melody. It probably would’ve been best to sort of play it like a guitar looking for some vamping in the tab. And try to vamp my way through it that would’ve revealed Mike’s approach to vamping this song and help me internalize the melody.

Licks in Context
Me learning licks has always been a real challenge. It probably comes natural to some people, and I have to listen to these folks (show offs!) in jams all the time, not to mention that everybody online is trying to teach you a new lick. The problem is they don’t teach you the lick in context. Finally! This lesson is full of licks in context! No, I’m not saying they’re gonna be easy to play even at this slow song rate, but at least it gives you something to work with. I mean, how many of us can sit in front of the TV playing,”dah—dah.dah.dah.dah” over and over all day long. Let me tell you it’s a fast track to divorce! But what I am saying here is in this lesson we can actually pretend we’re Ron Stewart, listening to the track attempting to apply each lick as it comes up. For me it’s not easy, but it is super cool! So try that and I bet you you’ll get a lot out of it and you’ll feel better especially after you go on YouTube and watch Ron Stewart do it on stage!

Isolated Voice Track
OK, so I was getting down to the end of the first page with absolutely no page in front of me and feeling pretty good about it, so it was time to whip out the Audigo, import the voice and guitar track with no bleed through and see what I sounded like, which was fun and reduced the frustration because I could already tell the second page was gonna be a lot harder, my fat fingers above the 12th fret!

Finally
Well, I’m still not completely there yet, getting closer and I feel like it’s gonna happen with all these great tools in front of me. Every day I’m so glad I don’t have to play an LP at half speed to learn this stuff!

Here’s something else I discovered you can do if you’re having trouble getting the lick timing right just try vamping through the song with interspaced licks until you get the timing and lick sequence. down. Hope this helps.