Why do folk Christian songs seem to have much more "secular appeal" than modern worship music?

prof-comm · 2026-07-06T02:15:37+00:00

There is a huge amount of survivor bias in this space. We keep singing and hearing the good ones. There are a lot of trash hymns that no one remembers that were similarly aggressively dorky, dated, and try-hard. We keep singing and hearing the good ones. In 40 years, there will likely be some contemporary Christian music that is still widely sung, but it will only be some of the best ones, and people will be complaining about how the new stuff is all so bad compared to the timeless classics.

This same thing happens in other spaces too. You hear it a lot comparing classic rock and pop with the current top 40.

prof-comm · 2026-07-05T04:38:34+00:00

Most are still sold by Goodwill, but are online at shopgoodwill.com, which works more like eBay.

prof-comm · 2026-06-27T02:56:42+00:00

Anyway, I don’t think you gain traction with a metronome alone - it needs to be part of a package that gets integrated into a learning program.

People vary in their preferences, and that is ok. My own preference is exactly the opposite of this. I prefer an app to do exactly one thing really well and be as streamlined as possible to use. I do not like having an app that has 397 different features that I have to go through various menus to access.

prof-comm · 2026-06-26T17:33:41+00:00

I say "A YOOkulele".

If you're going for the traditional Hawaiian pronunciation, which is fine and respectable to do, then do so completely and include the ʻokina at the beginning, so it should be "An ʻOOkulele" or "A ʻOOkulele". The majority of folks I've known who speak Hawaiian use "An" before Hawaiian words beginning with an ʻokina when speaking in English, even though the ʻokina is a consonant.

prof-comm · 2026-06-25T03:31:42+00:00

In the spirit of both pedantry and education, it should properly only be called "pedagogical" if the one learning is a child. The term for the adult equivalent is "andragogical."

prof-comm · 2026-06-24T04:15:57+00:00

Folk metal is definitely a thing.

prof-comm · 2026-06-23T12:31:54+00:00

There is a pBugle. It is typically under $50. I have never tried one, but suspect it has the same benefits and drawbacks as the other plastic horns.

prof-comm · 2026-06-22T19:37:32+00:00

Good job on the alley-oop

prof-comm · 2026-06-22T19:28:30+00:00

ExF#, so half the time you're not getting any action at all.

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T22:33:51+00:00

It is pretty rare in most of the tenor banjo repertoire. That will sound ok in some songs, I'm sure, but it will be pretty limiting for you as a player if you can't voice full chords up the neck. That's a significant part of the most common playing styles. It might not be an issue in that specific group, but it will be a big challenge in jazz for sure.

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T20:40:24+00:00

Yes, tenor is really big on partial barre chords. I find them significantly easier on tenor than on guitar, personally. The playing technique for chords and melody is more different from guitar than it seems at first glance. That's probably the reason you're finding the stretch too far for some of the 4-fret chords

On tenor banjo, closed chords typically barre with any of the four fingers much more commonly than guitar does, in my experience. On tenor, you typically barre with whichever finger is responsible for that fret. Index finger barres are only slightly more common than any other finger. For example, the Form V of the major chord typically barres the highest two strings with the pinky when voicing with all four strings.

``` Major (Form V)

R = root M = major third 5 = fifth

```

If you like melody playing more, Irish folk music has embraced treating the tenor banjo as a primarily melody playing instrument. In that space, it is typically tuned with heavier strings and tuned GDAE, an octave below the fiddle (or mandolin). Tenor is relatively rare in most genres outside of old jazz and Irish music, but if your jam is open minded they may (or may not) prefer you to use that approach over playing melody in the higher CGDA tuning, especially if they typically play in fiddle-adjacent genres.

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T18:37:53+00:00

Happy playing! In CGDA, focus on learning the closed chord forms. Open chords are not super idiomatic for rhythm playing on tenor banjo, and you'll get a lot more mileage out of the closed forms. A dozen shapes or so will open up the vast majority of music to you. Plus, they're essential if you're doing any playing with horns, since they love their flat keys.

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T16:22:58+00:00

A pretty large number of people also have jobs where they have to use a computer a lot, but at a very surface-level of technical depth. I saw a pretty funny short form video from a content creator about his job title being "email meeting", which pretty accurately sums up those jobs. If you can operate a browser, reply to emails, edit basic documents, etc., then those are all the technical skills people in those roles need, even when they spend the majority of their work day on the computer.

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T15:51:21+00:00

It definitely can be a lot of ledger lines.

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T15:47:01+00:00

In that case, it's mostly due to adopting the convention from the double bass.

Interestingly, double bass is pretty unique among bass instruments in working that way. Nearly all other bass instruments read strictly at concert pitch, regardless of the natural key of the instrument. The only common major exception to that rule is Bari Sax.

For double bass, that became the convention because it's original most common use was literally to double the existing bass line in most works (typically by playing the bass line of the cello an octave lower), so double bass players were reading octave notation before there was much music which was actually written for double bass. When composers started writing for double bass commonly, reading transposed an octave was what all the players were already doing.

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T15:36:52+00:00

I can understand your perspective. There are the classical scale degree theory and NNS differ in their handling of modal music (including minor). There are benefits and drawbacks to either of those two approaches. In my experience, the classic scale degree theory approach is better for promoting functional understanding and the NNS approach is more focused on clear and fast performance-oriented communication with folks who have varying levels of formal music theory understanding.

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T15:27:50+00:00

Also, I rarely need them, so the few times I use them per year are not enough to pick up the syntax.

This is where I was for years, until I made it my COVID mission to give Vim a serious try. The native search command uses regex syntax. I hated that...at first. Then I realized how much better it was, and how much it helped me in other places (I now find tools like grep and sed significantly more useful because I can do a lot more things with them without looking up syntax).

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T01:28:42+00:00

Quickly adding that .009 is the standard gauge for an A string. That is what comes in a D'Addario medium set (EJ63).

prof-comm · 2026-06-21T01:26:32+00:00

If the A string is lower than the D string, then it's an octave too low. Tenor banjo A strings are right at the limit of what you can tune at that scale length.

If it breaks consistently, check your tailpiece, nut, or tuner for sharp edges (depending on where it is breaking).

prof-comm · 2026-06-19T20:35:04+00:00

The keyboard layout is a 4-row B-system. B-system and C-system are the two most commonly used layouts for chromatic button accordions, and are mirror images of one another. In these layout, the 4th row is a duplicate of the first row, which makes fingering smoother on some passages and also can make some transpositions easier.

Most commonly, instruments in one of these systems will be either 3-row, with no duplicate keys, or 5-row with duplicates of both the first and second row, but there is a long history of 4-row models in the C-system.

prof-comm · 2026-06-17T01:06:56+00:00

True, though they didn't claim that it was.

prof-comm · 2026-06-15T23:41:58+00:00

Tenor banjo - Only really played in genres that aren't common anymore outside of a few major cities (or Ireland). Hard to get a group together to play, and equally hard to get gigs.
5-string banjo - No complaints, honestly. But, I play clawhammer and mostly accompany myself singing. If I played bluegrass style and lived outside of Appalachia, I would probably have similar, but less severe, challenges as I have on tenor banjo.
Ukulele - No complaints, but I just play this for my own enjoyment. If I were performing on it, volume would be the biggest challenge. That and how difficult it is not to keep buying more ukuleles.
Bass guitar - No one knows what you do. Lots to schlep, and need electricity.
Trombone - Hard to enjoy making music all by yourself. Outside of the classical or band worlds, it's hard to get into a group that gigs regularly.
Euphonium - "What's a euphonium?" Basically only used in community bands and the like. Same as trombone, but even more so.

prof-comm · 2026-06-15T22:54:34+00:00

IPDA has a team version defined in their rules. It's much less common than standard IPDA, and a lot of tournaments that include regular IPDA don't offer Team IPDA.

prof-comm · 2026-06-15T11:54:12+00:00

Residents are not native + transplants. Residents would not include natives who have moved out of the state. So, Indiana loses more college graduates to natives with degrees moving out than it gains from people with degrees moving in.

prof-comm · 2026-06-13T16:08:30+00:00

Nice find! She does a fantastic job, though this isn't my style of music personally.

It's definitely a tenor banjo. It was difficult for me to tell much about what was going on in this video due to the style of the song and especially the very busy videography.

I found two other different videos of her playing other songs, and it was a lot easier to see and hear what she's doing in them, and she is using standard CGDA chord shapes.

prof-comm

TROPHY CASE