B on Banjo: the Numbers It Answers To

Everything rooted on B, 62 qualities in 10 families. A chart will ask for three or four of them by number and leave the rest to the record, but the root is the part the number pins down, so this is the page a reader lands on first.

B answers to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and the 7 depending on what got called: it is a plain number in 7 of the twelve keys and needs an accidental in the other 5.

A banjo player reads a number as somewhere to be when the roll comes back around — the right hand keeps going through the bar line, so a chart change is a destination the left hand has to reach without the pattern stopping. The picking hand is committed a beat before the change, so the digit has to be converted while the previous one is still sounding.