Songs · Banjo · Intermediate
Devil’s Dream
Traditional (British Isles), a favorite of Southern fiddlers and bluegrass banjo players · Reel, printed in American fiddle books in the 1800s
Banjo · bluegrassthree-finger rollsA major4/4 time16 barsopen G tuningcapo at fret 2
Arranged: Teddy Rook Book: three-finger banjo with a capo at the 2nd fret, fingered in G so it sounds in A with the fiddle; an octave below the fiddle.
Capo at fret 2. Clamp the capo just behind fret 2. The tab and the chord names count from the capo, as if it were the nut: play the shapes as written and everything sounds 2 half steps higher. Raise the short 5th string by the same amount (most players use a little spike or a 5th-string capo).
Loading the music…
About this piece
A busy reel whose A part rocks back and forth on one high note. Fiddlers play it in A, so banjo players put a capo at the 2nd fret (and raise the 5th string two frets, to A) and play it with G-position fingering: the tab and the chord names are counted from the capo, so they read like G, C and D. Almost every eighth note is a note of the tune. Start slowly; the roll shapes repeat, and so does the tune.
What it practices
- playing with a capo
- every note of a fast reel
- the 5th string as a melody note
- pull-offs in a row
- the I M T M roll shape
Chords in this song
Each link opens the chord finder with more ways to play that chord.
Where the notes come from
Melody checked note by note against “Devil’s Dream” in Cole’s 1000 Fiddle Tunes (the 1940 reissue of Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, 1883), as transcribed in ABC by John B. Walsh at MIT’s abc collection (trillian.mit.edu). Played an octave lower; the fiddle’s sixteenth notes are our eighth notes, and the pickups are left out. Every note of that version is in our tab at its time. Chords are ours.
How to practice with it
- Listen first. Press Play and follow along. The note being played lights up in the tab, in the notation and on the fretboard, and the chord being played lights up in the row of chord diagrams.
- Learn the chords. Press each diagram to hear it, then practice changing between them slowly.
- Slow it down. Use − and + to set the tempo. 60% is a good place to start; the notes keep their pitch.
- Loop the hard part. Under More…, turn on Loop, pick the bars, and play them a few times in a row. Count-in gives you a bar of clicks before it starts.
Click a bar in the music to start from there. Space plays and pauses. Left-handed? Turn on the left-handed view: the chord diagrams and the fretboard are mirrored to match your instrument. Tab reads the same either way: the top line is always the first (highest) string.