Fascinating Facets of the Fiddle

Did you ever try to draw a bow across a fiddle?  If you can do it just right it will induce something called Helmholtz motion in the strings (for an explanation of this phenomenon please see the footnote at the end of this post1).  This is really intriguing, and it makes quite a beautiful sound… but it takes just the right touch.  And if you don’t have just the right touch, you get this heinous sound of tortured cats that we all associate with novice violinists.

I’ve heard people assert that the violin is the hardest instrument to play and having dragged my family thru the obligatory hours of suffering from screeching noises early in my fiddling career, I can attest the same.  Today is the last installment in our series of covering the five standard bluegrass instruments and I will be covering the devil’s instrument in some detail.  Let’s start with a few things you might want to know about bluegrass fiddling.

The Not So Basics

I have found that getting through the basics on the fiddle is quite a bit harder than the other instruments associated with bluegrass.  One of the first obstacles that the novice violinist is likely to encounter is simply holding the instrument.  You probably wouldn’t have thought of jamming an instrument under your chin as a way to hold it while performing but it does seem to be the only way in which to secure a violin that frees up both hands for playing purposes.  Unless of course you are playing old time music, where any combination of chest, arms, legs and torso to secure the fiddle is considered legitimate. 

Once the violin is securely wedged under her chin, your fiddler will want to conjure up some good Helmholtz motion on one of her strings.  This is not an easy task, as was implied in my opening remarks.  Successfully bowing a non-scratchy note demands that an unusually shaped 29” long stick be held by its very bottom end with a grip that can only be described as awkward².  While clutching thusly, the stick must be precisely manipulated in such a way as to accurately modulate the pressure of sticky horsehair fibers scraping against steel violin strings in a perfectly straight trajectory with an ever changing cantilever force provided by the portion of the bow that remains hanging out over the violin.

All the gesticulations of the aforementioned flying stick need to be controlled with a peculiar but extraordinarily precise set of gestures involving just about every one of the 37 joints in the right arm, wrist, hand and fingers.  Believe me, it is much easier to manipulate a flatpick, easily gripped between forefinger and thumb and situated less than 1” away from a string that merely has to be set in motion with a single stroke.

You may have noticed the lack of frets on a fiddle fingerboard and this is indeed, yet another obstacle that presents itself to the inchoate fiddler.  Fingers must of course be precisely placed on said fingerboard to play in tune and this is quite a chore to do when your left arm is contorted like a pretzel underneath your violin.  Once the fingers have been placed, slid or hammered on in the right spots, the violinist must soften the note with a bit of vibrato³ – and this will involve engagement of all 37 joints of the left arm, wrist, hands and fingers in another completely unnatural set of, in this case, pretzel-shaped movements.

All of the above must be mastered simply to eek out a decent rendition of  “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”  Have you considered playing a harmonica instead?

Intimating Intimidating Intonation

They now make these tuners that clip onto the body of your fiddle so you can see the readout while you are playing.  This is a tempting way for a budding fiddler to get an approximate idea of where to put ones fingers but it is a bad idea to continue to use this technique to develop great intonation.  In order to see why, we will have to dip briefly into the complex topic of temperament.  No, not the bad temperament your fiddler has developed while learning the gyrations described above, but the good temperament of frequencies of sound to form western musical scales.

Very briefly, temperament can be defined as the tweaking of notes to be sharp or flat (as compared with the "pure" note that is created from the harmonics of a vibrating string) so that instruments can sound in tune in a specific application such as, say, bluegrass music.  There are several temperament schemes that are applicable to bluegrass music, the most important of which are equal tempering, Pythagorean tempering and just tempering. 

Your electronic tuner uses equal temperament, which allows an instrument like a keyboard or guitar to play in any key.  It is basically splitting the difference in all the keys and this averaging allows playing in different keys without retuning.  A fiddle, however, can do better than that and when playing melody, it sounds much better to use Pythagorean temperament.  That is, until two or more strings are played at once (called a double-stop) and in this case, in order to sound true, the fiddler will have to switch to just temperament.  A more detailed description is beyond the scope here but Dr. Sassmanshaus has an informative tutorial of these three temperaments if you are interested <link>. 

31 Different Flavors of a Note

A single note produced on the fiddle has quite a few dimensions in addition to the obvious vanilla, chocolate and strawberry flavors of pitch, duration and loudness.  Listen carefully for how a fiddled note starts – good violinists can, for example, choose to define the beginning of a note with an almost inaudible 50 millisecond “scratch” which gives the note considerable definition.  Alternatively a fiddler such as, say, Kenny Baker, can choose to switch bow directions and make nary a sound, and doing so gives an impression of extreme smoothness and fluidity.  Notes can be slurred by playing multiple fingerings in a single bowstroke.  Volume can be changed for dramatic effect during long bowstrokes.  Trills, triplets and other decorations can be added fluidly at any point during a single bowstroke or with separate bowstrokes without worrying about pick direction.  Generally speaking, none of these additional flavors are available to your plectrum holding peers, and when used properly by a competent fiddler, they enable the violin to be an extremely expressive instrument. 

The more general topic of how one might use bow motions to get these effects has been widely explored thru the ages by many a violinist.  These maestros have provided formal names for at least the 31 original Baskin Robbins equivalents for fiddle bowstrokes, using such appellations as detaché, martelé, staccato, spiccato and of course legato.  I will again refer you to Dr. Sassmanshaus for an excellent tutorial on these techniques and more if you are interested <link>. 

Shuffling Through Various Bowing Patterns

Mandolin and guitar both have flatpicking and crosspicking patterns.  Scruggs style banjo has its various rolls.  The analog on fiddle would be bowing patterns, the simplest of which is a sawstroke.  Here, the bow changes direction with every note.  And, as mentioned above, if you instead play two or more notes sequentially in a single bow stroke it is called a slur and these are quite useful for smoothing things out – especially if you don’t have Kenny Baker’s ability to turn the bow around without anybody noticing.  Slurs are also essential in order to shuffle.  No, not the dance but the bowing pattern.

There are a couple of shuffles that are used in bluegrass and old time fiddling.  The Nashville shuffle, called “potatoes” for some strange reason when it is used to kick off a song, is characterized by one long bow and two short bow strokes.  It sounds like this:  do-dickey-do-dickey-do-dickey-do.   The long bowstroke (the “do) consists of two slurred sixteenth notes (or a single eighth note) and then the short bows (the “dickeys”) are sawstroked as sixteenth notes.  Here is an easy to follow video on how to do it if you are interested <link>.  Things can get tricky when first learning to shuffle, however – the bow direction reverses on every other long note and it takes some getting used to.  Once a fiddler learns the Nashville shuffle, it is so cool that the tendency is to use it for everything.  This disease is called shuffleitus and is surprisingly common among novice fiddlers.  I myself suffered quite a long bout of it early on. The only known cure is a combination of sawstrokes and longbow.

Some old time fiddlers use a variation called the Georgia shuffle – this is a pretty slick technique that consists of one short bow (usually a down stoke) and a long bow (upstroke).  The short (down) bow is a single sixteenth note and as many as three slurred sixteenth notes can be played with the long (up) bow.   Obviously the velocity of the bow is quite a bit higher on the short downstroke, since it has to cover the same distance as the upstroke in 1/3 of the time - this gives that note an automatic emphasis and represents another form of syncopation.  It is quite catchy but hard to initiate.   Here is a pretty good instructional video on how to shuffle the Georgia way if you are so inclined <link>.  

If you are more generally interested in these and other shuffles, there is quite an extensive thread on the Fiddle Hangout, and I’d urge you to read thru it <link>.  

While we are shuffling it might be good to cover the double shuffle.  This is known by various other names, including triple shuffle and hokum bow.  Here we have again the highly syncopated pattern of beating three against eight that we saw in the mandolin and guitar crosspicking and then again in our discussion of Scruggs style banjo.  The best place to hear some hokum bow is during the climax of the fiddler’s showpiece The Orange Blossom Special.  Here is a link to a video of my friend and fiddle virtuoso Annie Staninec playing the aforementioned standard, including a highly impressive triple shuffle. 

I will conclude this section with a few words on bow direction.  In bowing, as in flatpicking, it is desirable to have a downstroke coincide with the downbeat⁴.  This is because the downstroke is naturally much more powerful and will lend the right feel to the music when executed at a downbeat.  However, as can be observed by trying to use the bow patterns described above in an actual song, it is impossible to strictly always follow the downstroke on the downbeat rule.  Note that this is most unlike flatpicking a guitar or mandolin, where it is mandatory to follow the down-pick on a downbeat rule (with a couple of exceptions).  So, for fiddlers, I have a similar but slightly more nuanced recommendation.  My suggestion is to work one's bowing by being flexible when playing most notes... i.e. have freedom to choose up or down as seems to fit the tune and/or the pattern.  However, always make sure that the bow direction gets back to being a downstroke on important downbeats5.  An example of an important downbeat would be a note at the beginning of the A part or B part of a fiddle tune or perhaps at the beginning of a distinctive phase.  This approach will leave a good deal more freedom of how to bow the intervening notes, which will be needed in order to accommodate all of the various bowing patterns that are described above.

Putting Theory into Practice

It is said that a good bluegrass fiddle break⁶ consists of lots of longbow. True that.  It involves lots of bluesy licks.  Also true that.  Chubby Wise set early precedence for this back in the 1940s with Bill Monroe’s seminal bluegrass band and excellent fiddlers have continued the same.  There is no better way to learn about bluegrass fiddling than to listen to it.  Let me conclude with a list of my favorite bluegrass fiddlers and include a few comments on each. 

·      Kenny Baker – really smooth, classic style, set the standard for bluegrass fiddling.  A highly recommended CD is the classic Kenny Baker plays Bill Monroe.  This is mandatory listening.  Kenny recorded many other instrumental CDs.  He was with Bill Monroe for something like 20 years and passed away relatively recently.

·      Bobby Hicks – among many other things, Bobby played on a series of bluegrass albums called “The Bluegrass Album Band”.  This is the archetypal fiddle and also mandatory listening. Bobby’s contribution on these recordings is bluegrass fiddling at its finest.

·      Benny Martin was one of the original Flatt and Scruggs fiddle players back in the ‘50s and defined some really archetypal licks that are widely copied even today.

·      Paul Warren, also one of the Flatt and Scruggs original fiddlers back in the 50’s and 60s – set the standard for smooth fiddling pre-Kenny.

·      Vassar Clements – one of Bill Monroe’s fiddlers, Vassar had a more relaxed and distinctly bluesy style.  Became one of the “old and in the way” (Jerry Garcia, Peter Rowan, ...) hippy movement. Passed away some time ago.

·      Some more fiddlers that are or were highly influential in bluegrass: All worth checking out.

• Aubrey Haynie
• Michael Cleveland
• Stuart Duncan
• Alison Krauss
• Andy Leftwich
• Ricky Skaggs
• Jim Van Cleve
• Benny Simms
•  Jim Buchanan
• Curley Ray Cline
• Howdy Forrester
• Byron Berline
• Scotty Stoneman
• Arthur Smith
• Mack Magaha
• Art Stamper
• And of course the aforementioned Chubby Wise!

I'm sure to have left out other important bluegrass fiddlers.  If I have not mentioned your favorite, please go ahead and include him or her in the reader's comments.

This concludes my five part series on the standard bluegrass instruments. (I don't play resonator guitar or Dobro so I don't feel qualified to cover that instrument.)  I'll be spending next week out at Wintergrass in Bellevue, Washington.  I'm performing on bass with the band Faast and Blair, and if you are out there, please be sure to say hello.  In subsequent posts, I'll be exploring the human voice, three part harmony and other important aspects of singing in bluegrass music.  I may insert an intervening post with a light treatment of some music theory as it will make the one on harmony easier to digest.

Keep on pickin'!

¹ I have often wondered why a violin string makes a sound when horsehair is drawn across it.  As alluded to in the opening paragraph, Hermann von Helmholtz pondered the same thing in 1877 and figured it out.  Here is a slow motion video of a bowed violin string – one that von Helmholtz could never have made in his day <link>.  Fast forward to about the 1:00 mark and you can easily see the mechanics involved.  Turns out it is a slip / stick mechanism.  First, the bow sticks onto your strings and tugs at it so it is pulled into a point.   When the side force of the extended string exceeds what the horsehair can hold, it slips.  This causes a triangular wave to propagate towards the bridge.  Upon reaching the bridge, the wave reflects and inverts.   When the inverted wave gets to your bow again, since it is now causing the string to move in the same direction that your bow is slipping, and it helps the bow gain traction and stick again.  The triangular wave continues to propagate towards the nut, reflects off the nut and re-inverts.  When this wave reaches your bow again, since it is now pushing the string in the opposite direction that the bow is moving, it initiates another slip… and then the cycle starts all over again.   This slip / stick cycle happens at exactly the resonant frequency of the string which is the frequency of the note that you are trying to play.

²The tip of your right thumb touches the underside of the stick near the frog.  Flesh from your forefinger (between the first knuckle and the hand joint) applies downward bow pressure while the very tip of your right pinkie provides a countering force (think teeter-totter).  Your middle finger and your thumb somehow act as a fulcrum between the forces applied by your pinkie and your forefinger.  And you are controlling all six degrees of freedom with this grip of the stick.

³Vibrato is even more effective than you might think because of the jagged frequency spectra that violins have and the way that the sound is distributed into space.  When you change the frequency of the note even ever so slightly with the tip of your finger, the odds are that the note will transition thru many of these jagged amplitude peaks in the frequency response curve.  In addition, the spatial distribution of sound will change dramatically as well.  These two effects will make the sound of the fiddle really sparkle and is the source of much of its magic. 

⁴Note that there is a lack of consensus in the fiddle community on this topic.  In fact I have heard several so-called “any-which-way” bowers that sound quite good – these are fiddlers that do not abide by the downstroke rule.  I’ve also heard a few good “upbowers” who perform the opposite of the downstroke rule.  But if you are just starting out, I personally strongly recommend adopting a down-bowing style.

⁵Note that this will usually entail ensuring the bowstroke right before an important downbeat consists of an upbow.  This is to avoid a dreaded circle bow motion where the bow must be lifted off the strings and returned at a higher place so another downbow can be started without running out of bow.

⁶Bluegrass fiddling is a very specific kind of style.  Typically it is used to accompany bluegrass singing songs where the fiddle plays backup and then will take an instrumental break / solo when it is the fiddler’s turn.  A typical bluegrass break in a song (vocal number) would be composed of lots of longbow (legato) and maybe some “saw strokes” – the better fiddlers do this in a detaché kind of style.  Some songs are “modal” (containing a flat 7^th) and many are based on a blues (minor) pentatonic scale.  Other bluegrass songs are more major and stick to the diatonic notes with lots of emphasis of the _major_ pentatonic scale notes and a few passing dissonant notes and/or brief interesting patterns (often out of key) which are quickly resolved.  Bluegrass instrumental tunes tend to be derived from old time fiddle tunes but are more up tempo and tend to be in A or G or even B instead of the “old timey” keys of C and D. 

The Boisterous Bluegrass Banjo

Can you imagine bluegrass music without a banjo?  If you've ever tried to play a bluegrass song without a Scruggs style banjo it might sound good but odds are that people wouldn’t recognize it as bluegrass.  In fact, more than any other instrument, the banjo is what makes bluegrass sound like bluegrass.  What is it about this essential bluegrass instrument that gives the music such drive? 

Five Things about the Bluegrass Banjo

This is the fourth installment in our series examining each of the standard bluegrass instruments and their roles in our music.  Today, we will take a look at a five things to know about the bluegrass banjo and then follow on with some demos.  We'll conclude with a short history of banjos before the bluegrass era.

1) You Can't Miss It  Even the most casual observer wouldn't overlook the sound of a banjo playing in an ensemble.  There is some good science to the banjo's loud and piercing tone, and if you are interested please see the footnote1.  Further, if you think about it, the average banjo player flings considerably more of these penetrating notes into the air than anyone else during an average bluegrass song2.  These two factors raise the banjo to a prominence in the music that can't be missed.  Just try not to drown out the mandolin player.  Please.  

2) Atomic Clock-like Precision They say that Earl and Horace Scruggs used to kick off a tune on banjo and guitar in their front yard, and then, while playing, would separately walk around the house in different directions, meeting in the back yard.  Since they both had the Scruggs “timing” gene, they remained synchronized even when out of earshot and were in exactly the same place in the song when they came back together. 

Earl set the bar for machine-gun like timing precision and to my ear nobody has exceeded it.  He also set precedence for all Scruggs-style banjo players that came after him, and you can tell immediately if your local banjo player is respecting Earl’s timing dictum.  Listen to the spacing of the notes.  Unless our budding banjo player has the equivalent of Earl's hypothalamus, he simply must practice with a metronome in order to play adequate banjo.  Or choose another instrument.  As mentioned above, banjoists are going to be spewing quite a few notes all over the place - and these notes had better be lined up with where all the other notes are occurring in the band.  A banjo that is not quite in time can really mush up a bluegrass band's sound.

3) Archetypal Licks Simply put, there are certain mandatory banjo licks and backup moves that need to be played.  They make the music sound like bluegrass.  They can't not be there.  The banjo player needs to repeatedly exploit on the order of half a dozen or so of these quintessential licks and approximately the same number of backup patterns.  At just the right places.  With just the right emphasis and timing.   Earl's book has it all in there as does his playing on the Foggy Mountain Banjo album.  It is to be learned note-for-note.  Emphasis included.

4) Droning On and On The drone string is unique to the banjo and plays a critical role in the creation of the bluegrass sound.  It is often called the thumb string for the obvious reason that the right thumb almost always picks it.  As you may know, this string is pinched off at a higher place on the neck than the other four strings, making it shorter. This causes it to be higher pitched and more shrill than the other strings and can be clearly distinguished from the din of the rest of the banjo’s multitudinous notes.  Further, as will be illustrated in the demos below, the Scruggs style forces the right thumb to repeatedly strike its namesake string in a highly syncopated and pulsing fashion, which is a big part of the magical rhythmic drone for which the banjo is known.

5) Beating Three Against Eight Scruggs style banjoists will always install three banjo picks. They are put on the thumb, index and middle fingers of the right hand (abbreviated T, I and M) and three is a number that doesn’t divide evenly into eight.  This creates a problem in trying to play a song in a bluegrass time signature which has eight 16th notes.  Your first inclination is just to roll your three fingers sequentially and play T-I-M-T-I-M-T-I-M-T-I-M and so on.  The problem here is that, unless you are playing a waltz, important melody notes don't occur in threes as your roll does.  The notes you really want to play will occur in twos and fours... i.e. at spots that align with eighth or quarter note spacings.  These melody notes are very awkward to play with a roll based on threes.  

This flummoxed quite a few three-finger banjoists in the early part of the 20^th century.  One solution was to use only two fingers instead of three, which completely solves the problem:  melody notes will naturally show up on even boundaries.  Alternately, early three-fingered banjoists used something akin to a so-called “square roll” which repeats the thumb: T-I-T-M-T-I-T-M. This also solves the problem since you are back at T on all the two- and four-boundaries.  In either of these two approaches, all the melody notes fall right where they are supposed to be and “Oh Susanna” or “Jingle Bells” will sound just like it is written.  But it won't sound like bluegrass.

We now know that by the year 1945, Earl had preserved the groupings of three and just kept rolling forward with T-I-M-T-I-M-T-I.  He also added a few other rolls that have three-groupings - these include playing that same pattern backwards and also playing it "reversed" (1/2 forward and then 1/2 way backwards)3.  To solve the aforementioned problem with two- and four- boundaries, he moved the melody to fit the roll instead of altering the roll to fit the melody.  As will be shown in the demos below, this inherently causes the melody notes to be syncopated since they are played at unexpected places.  And boy does it sound like bluegrass.

Demonstrations

Let’s take a simple song like Jingle Bells in order to illustrate some of the principles that were discussed above.  The bare melody, when played by the banjo, would go something like this: <link>

A couple of things to note:  The melody is clearly there, but it is totally lacking in drive and syncopation.  Boring. 

Next, I’ll play Jingle Bells clawhammer style <link>.  

Clawhammer is the style that preceded bluegrass and is still quite popular today in old time circles.  This rendition of Jingle Bells has drive and rhythm – the drone string is supplying a regular “beat” upon which the melody is being played.  In addition to plain vanilla clawhammer, I am occasionally using a technique called “drop thumb” to capture a few of the melody notes – and this has the advantage of syncopating them a bit.  You can hear that I’ve moved the beginning of the phrase “oh what fun it is to ride” to start on a delayed note (the “oh”…) by playing it with a “dropped thumb”. If you watch the video again, note at that spot (I’ve emphasized it for clarity) you can see that instead of continuing on with its usual assignment of plucking just the drone string, I “drop” my thumb down to the second string to catch that particular melody note.  This is the essence of syncopation – your ear expects to hear the note at one place and by delaying it, I am “surprising” your ear and consequently, your brain wants to pay attention to the music more.  I repeat that same trick several times in the last portion of the song.

Using the “drop thumb” technique in clawhammer style supplies some syncopation and interest to the music but it doesn’t yet contain quite the drive that a bluegrass banjo has.  Let’s put the finger picks back on and play Jingle Bells a third time, this time using Scruggs style: <link>

This is starting to sound more like bluegrass.  It contains even more syncopation of the melody than the drop thumb technique did.  As discussed above in the "Beating Three Against Eight" section, in order for me to even fit the melody of Jingle Bells into Scruggs style roll I have to move melody notes around – some a little later and some a little earlier.  So your ear is being continually surprised and it wants to continue to pay attention.  In addition, as was discussed in the "Droning On and On" section above, the Scruggs rolls force the drone string to ring in quite a syncopated and pulsing pattern. This is in sharp contrast to the clawhammer drone string in the second demo, which rings on a very regular non-syncopated pattern.  

Pre-Bluegrass Banjo

I'd like to conclude with a short history of the banjo - before Bluegrass was invented by Bill Monroe in 1945.  There is widespread agreement that the banjo originated in Africa and was brought over to America by enslaved people as part of the tragic “middle passage.”  Early American banjos, or “banjars,” were fashioned by the enslaved with a calabash gourd as a body, a head made of groundhog hide, a fretless wooden neck and three or four strings. The names of the black American musicians who mastered the 4-string gourd banjo are unfortunately lost to history but one or more of them taught Joel Walker Sweeney to play a gourd banjo in about 1823.  It is highly likely that the all-important drone string and its rhythmic implications were already an integral part of the banjo when Sweeney learned to play it but he is given credit for adding a fifth (lower in pitch) string and a wooden sound box (instead of a gourd) to the instrument’s design.  Sweeney and others like him ushered the banjo into its heyday as part of the mistral era in the mid-1800s.  Featured in blackface acts, the banjo became wildly popular and unfortunately has remained somewhat associated with minstrel shows in our collective memory. 

Back in those days, banjos were plucked with a style variously called clawhammer or frailing.  This is the style that came over from Africa and that I demonstrated in the second video.  To play clawhammer style banjo, your hand needs to take the rough shape of a hammer – if you make a hitchhiking pose with your right hand and slightly loosen your fist, you can see it sort of looks like a clawhammer.  Now turn your hand 180^o and situate it right above your air banjo.  The surface of the fingernails rap (twice in a row) downwards onto one or more (non-thumb) strings and the thumb then naturally hooks onto the thumb string.  The resulting highly rhythmic “ bump-ditty-bump-ditty” droning is characteristic of this style and can be quite hypnotic.  There is much more to discuss regarding this style of banjo playing and perhaps we will cover it more thoroughly in a future blog.  All this stuff so far happened before Earl showed up at the Grand Old Opry just before Christmas in 1945, which, as we now know, changed everything.

Keep on pickin'!

Footnotes:

¹There are several physical factors contributing to the banjo's penetrating and loud tone:

• If you put a signal analyzer on the banjo and subject it to Fourier analysis you will see that almost all the energy is in a 6KHz range.  This is a very narrow range and not at all like other instruments in a bluegrass band.  Concentrating the energy in such a narrow range makes the banjo naturally sound loud - especially considering this is the range of frequencies that the human ear is most sensitive to.  
• In addition, also unlike other acoustic instruments, the fundamental frequency has less energy than the upper partials; most of the sound energy is contained in the first five overtones.  In fact, the low "D" string has nearly 100% of its energy in overtones and not the fundamental - in this case, your "ear" is inferring the fundamental tone from the overtones. 
• Another reason that banjos are so loud is due to the efficiency of sound production.  The bridge of a banjo is directly coupled to the head with few energy losses (when compared to other acoustic instruments). This causes the relatively short sustain of the banjo note (note that if the impedance was exactly matched and the coupling was 100% efficient, there would be zero sustain and the note would be all over at once - it would sound like a rifle shot).  Since the energy is bursted into a shorter note, it will sound louder in comparison to a more sustained note that distributes the same amount of energy over a longer time.  In addition, the vibrating head is a very efficient mechanism for transferring the acoustic energy to the air.  The net is that considerably less of the energy supplied by the picks ends up being wasted as heat as compared to other acoustic instruments. 
• Yet another factor in the banjo's apparent loudness is the extremely high gain that the instrument gets by focusing of the sound field to the front of the instrument.  Little acoustic energy is wasted by going to the top and back of the sound field.  If you are a banjo player, please remember this focusing effect - since your ears are located above and behind the diaphragm that is producing all the sound, the volume level that is heard in front of you is many times louder than you may think it is.
• See Dr. James Rae’s excellent analysis in chapter 5 of this reference <link> for more details.  Note that this is the same Dr. Rae that works with Steve Huber as a PhD consultant for his TrueTone banjos (featuring an HR20 tone ring and an engineered rim).  

²In fact, the note count for the 16 measures in a typical banjo break is over 100 and when you consider that the banjo typically rolls continuously, a three verse + chorus song with breaks will contain almost 1000 banjo notes.  The bass will have only supplied about ¼ of those notes in that same time period.  If you attend a bluegrass performance and stay thru one entire set, your ear will have ingested well over 10,000 banjo notes.

3You will also need to add in "escape" notes -  between two and four of them.  These are extra notes that will allow one of these "three-" rolls to even up the time at the end of a measure. For example, a measure of eight notes could be played in a forward roll as T-I-M-T-I-M-T-I and then repeated again starting with T.  The last two notes - the T and the I - are escape notes since they even up the roll and allow it to repeat again.  If the forward roll spans two measures, there will need to be either one or four escape notes at the end to get back to the even measure.   For example, T-I-M-T-I-M-T-I-M-T-I-M-T-I-T-M.  If the forward roll is sustained for three measures (or any multiple of three measures), no escape notes are needed.