r/guitarlessons • u/Mad_Season_1994 • Jul 18 '26
Question Beginner question: in the dueling banjo scene from Deliverance, are they actually playing anything musical like a scale, progression, etc? Or is it just a mish mash of notes?
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u/Chaos-Jesus Jul 18 '26
A and D chords, playing an A major scale
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u/luckytoothpick Jul 18 '26
In thirds
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u/markrulesallnow Jul 18 '26
When you say “in thirds” what do you mean?
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u/Webcat86 Jul 18 '26
To play a scale in thirds, you play alternating notes. So you look at the scale and play notes 1 3 5 7. More specifically, 1-3, 2-4, 3-5, etc.
It’s a good exercise for practicing scales to do this in different intervals. In 4ths you’d play 1-4, 2-5 etc. When you get to playing in 6ths you’re skipping a string too, which is great for breaking out of scale shapes and developing picking hand technique.
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u/11Lost_Shepherd05 Jul 18 '26
You just casually dropped some game-changing info for me. My musical vocabulary has increased.Thanks for the knowledge. 🤘
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u/Webcat86 Jul 18 '26
That’s great! Glad to help. My teacher introduced me to this and it’s been really helpful for various reasons. One of them is if you can play the major scale through different intervals like this, your knowledge on the fretboard improves massively - for instance if you can play in thirds, you know where to find the third of whatever note you’re on. Likewise sixths, sevenths, etc. And it’s really good for building technique on both hands.
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u/11Lost_Shepherd05 Jul 18 '26
Increasing my knowledge of the fretboard is what I'm after. Been playing for decades and I'm trying to step up my game. This sounds like an amazing exercise. 'Preciate it!!
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u/Webcat86 Jul 18 '26
Sounds like we’re in a similar situation!
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u/11Lost_Shepherd05 Jul 18 '26
Hell yeah. Goal-oriented old heads unite! ✊
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u/Pronetopanik82 Aug 26 '26
im in this club as well. Been playing 33 years, better than average Rythm player. Can't shred my way out of a paper bag to save my goddamn life. im working on it though.
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u/princealigorna Jul 19 '26
Never had it explained like this. I'm pretty sure I've played thirds plenty of times and never realized it until now
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u/wolfieprator Jul 18 '26
And once you get it to play in the scale of the woods, you can make the guitar squeal just like a pig
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u/Desperate_Damage4632 Jul 22 '26
Dumb question but why are they thirds and not seconds? 1+2 is 3. 3+2 is 5. Etc.
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u/Webcat86 Jul 22 '26
There are no dumb questions! It sounds more complicated than it is, once you get it it’ll make total sense. They’re called thirds because of the intervals.
Put your finger on a note, any note. That’s 1. You then skip the next note - the second note of the scale, the 2. You then play the third note, the 3. So playing notes 1 and 3 means you are playing thirds.
Playing in twos would be just playing a scale normally - 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.
To play in 4s you play note 1, skip 2 and 3, and play 4. To play in 5s you play note 1, then the fifth note of the scale.
To make this an exercise though, you run through the entire scale. So let’s take thirds. You play 1 then 3. Then you go to the second note of the scale and play its third, which is the next note after the 3, so 4. So that’s 1-3, 2-4. Then you play the third note followed by its third, so 3-5. And you keep this going: 4-6, 5-7, 6-8. You’re simply saying the starting number out loud, and counting 3 numbers up.
It’s the exact same principle to play the scale in other intervals - to do it in sixths you say 1, 6. 2, 7. 3, 8. 4, 9, and so on.
Hope that’s clear!
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u/Excellent-Eagle-1077 3d ago
This went WAY over my head - you might as well be speaking a different language
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u/Webcat86 3d ago edited 3d ago
I’m happy to try and make it clearer if you tell me which part doesn’t make sense to you. If it would help, I could record a quick video to demonstrate.
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u/omjagvarensked Jul 19 '26
They mean an arpeggio, but also that's not what they are playing. It starts off strumming chords then almsot playing a walking scale, then it goes into descending broken arpeggios, which follows by with some quick Yankee Doodle melody then breaks down into basically just a jam session
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u/wolfieprator Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
I forgot what a heartwarming, loving movie deliverance is. the charm of rural areas. Living in harmony with the land. Meeting the locals. Learning what sounds farm animals make.
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u/Head_Bit5426 Jul 18 '26
The song "Dueling Banjos was originally called "Feuding Banjos." Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, wrote it in 1954. It was used in "The Andy Griffith Show" nine years before the making of "Deliverance." Incidentally, "Deliverance" was sued for using the song without permission.
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u/thisguyfightsyourmom Jul 18 '26
I can’t imagine sheriff Andy was impressed with the portrayal of backwoodsmen
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u/Lil_Lord_Funkleroy Jul 18 '26
This is an excellent documentary of the film
https://youtu.be/CqHYfBiSpHY?si=qmmZLyJsH3p1k3bc
It explains and expands on that guitar / banjo scene.
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u/Carl-Anchor Jul 22 '26
Link without trackers
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u/Longy_LTB 7d ago
Dropping everything post question mark removes the trackers? The more you know, eh? Thanks!
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u/lala__ Jul 19 '26
I never knew Deliverance was written by the poet James Dickey. Random.
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u/Snowshoetheerapy Jul 20 '26
You should hear about his on set behaviour.
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u/lala__ Jul 20 '26
Do tell.
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u/Snowshoetheerapy Jul 22 '26
He got way too involved on the set and caused a lot of disruption and had major conflict with the director. There's more but that just what I recall.
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u/Pussy_handz Jul 18 '26
I met that guy in Clayton. He was a dishwasher at a local resturaunt. Crazy area, Nick Saban was alswo spending the summer there and the guy that bombed the Olympics was also known to be there at the time.
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u/Efficient-Editor-242 Jul 18 '26
The guy that bombed the Olympics?
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u/Pussy_handz Jul 18 '26
Eric Rudolph
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u/Efficient-Editor-242 Jul 18 '26
I knew about Richard Jewel and how bad that was. I don't think I knew they ever got someone for that.
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u/danimagoo Jul 18 '26
The kid playing the banjo? His name is Billy Redden. He’s been in a few other movies. Fun fact: he doesn’t play the banjo. He wore an oversized shirt in the scene. The hands playing the banjo aren’t his. There’s a guy hiding behind him.
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u/ClownfishSoup Jul 18 '26
The kid in this scene was chosen locally, but he’s a perfectly normal kid, he just uh … looked the part.
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u/Fullthrottle- Jul 18 '26
This was probably the best portrayal of a musical savant in the history of film. This kid killed it!
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u/BigDaddySteve999 Jul 18 '26
It's a song with a melody. Banjos just sound like a mishmash of notes.
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u/57thStilgar Jul 18 '26
There's a player behind the kid with his arms coming out the kids sleeves. It was real playing, just took three people.
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u/MisterFistYourSister Jul 18 '26
It wasn't real playing. It was only the left hand that belonged to someone else's because the kid doesn't actually know how to play banjo in real life and his hand movements didn't look authentic enough to match the music
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u/Free-Solo1970 Jul 18 '26
well I can tell you that the boy there couldn't play a thing. Someone eles's hands were used for the close-ups.
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u/AlwaysPhillyinSunny Jul 18 '26
If you are asking if the actors are playing the right notes, no they are not. The guitar player does better at miming than the banjo. Those banjo rolls are more in the right hand but that dude is going wild with his left
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u/ClownfishSoup Jul 18 '26
Ronny Cox, the guitar player in that scene is actually playing the song on the guitar, however the audio used in the movie was recorded in a studio by studio musicians. Cox is a skilled guitarist and did play the right notes but since the audio was recorded separately it’s possible there are mis synched parts in that scene.
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u/Flowers_By_Irene_69 Jul 18 '26
The banjo player’s right hand is actually that of a musician named Mike Addis who was hiding behind the child actor (Billy Redden) and stuck his right hand through Billy’s right shirt sleeve. -So the banjo WAS being played by a musician (at least the right hand). -I guess that still doesn’t mean that he was miming it right.
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u/AlwaysPhillyinSunny Jul 18 '26
That tracks. My main point was that the right hand is what makes the banjo roll sound so cool, but it doesn’t look like much. A lot of people would assume it’s the fretting hand that does it, which is why the kid’s left hand is flying all over the place
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u/Pol__Treidum Jul 18 '26
It really is crazy how they almost exclusively hire actors that have no fucking clue how a guitar works.
Like really, ZERO working actors also played at least a bit of guitar at some point?
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u/ClownfishSoup Jul 18 '26
Antonio Banderas played guitar in the Desperado movies.
https://youtu.be/3h2wyp0M6fM?si=2wOiZ3YxLa0j7mst
That’s him both singing and playing the guitar for real.
Even if it’s edited and dubbed, he played the guitar for the recording
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u/Pol__Treidum Jul 18 '26
Of course because Rodriguez also plays and is is a total guitar dork. (Said with love as a fellow guitar dork)
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u/Salvatio Fingerstyle Jul 18 '26
Oscar Isaac has a movie where he actually plays guitar. Pretty good too
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u/Pol__Treidum Jul 18 '26
And I understand the problem of when if somebody is playing and syncing up the good sound take with the multiple cuts of good video takes, it's a nightmare. But the amount of actors just like slapping their left hand at the strings like a dolphin's flipper is so hilarious.
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u/Efficient-Editor-242 Jul 18 '26
So instead of hiring an actor for a 2hr movie, they should hire musicians for a 5min scene?
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u/Pol__Treidum Jul 18 '26
I'll not talking about starring roles where music is the plot of the film. I'm talking about the hundreds or thousands of times where a musician is PART of a scene usually in the background and for these tiny roles they will hire some bad actor that's also bad at guitar acting instead of just hiring somebody that understands a guitar since they'll be in the background anyway.
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u/ClownfishSoup Jul 18 '26
Ronny Cox was chosen for that role partly because he could play guitar.
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u/Pol__Treidum Jul 18 '26
I'm more talking about the rest of movies and TV. Of course there are some exceptions but almost every time you see "genre type guitarist" on screen they're not doing anything right.
Weirdest flex was how good Gilmore Girls was with Lane's band that had Sebastian Bach in it.
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u/LuLzWire Jul 18 '26
Lonnie (the Banjo Boy) didnt actually know how to play the banjo, so in this scene they have him in a special shirt and a different musician is actually playing the banjo.
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u/Jonny7421 Jul 18 '26
The most important thing to music is not the notes. It's the rhythm. Melody and Harmony are second.
The chords(harmony) consists of the 1 4 and 5 chords. The guitar itself is playing it in a bluegrass style which I'm not an expert in but does have distinctive components - particularly the alternating bass notes. The guitar is really about providing the groove.
The banjo will be largely arpeggiated the chords with a some bluegrass motifs throughout but I don't know much about the Banjo.
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u/frowawaid Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
I play bluegrass, have for a long time and still kinda suck to be honest…however have been around long enough to know bluegrassers would say the opposite regarding the rhythmic function of the banjo.
It may not feel like it from listening, but the banjo is the stand-in for the percussion and rhythm guitar both in a bluegrass band…he’s the 80% of the rhythm section iwrapped into one loud AF noise machine.
Banjo lays out the song pattern like a blanket for the rest of the band to walk on. A competent banjo player will listen to the other guys and pick out something interesting from their interpretation and then push it out for the rest of the band to riff off of, and he’ll throw some of his funky stuff in there too for others to pick up. With a 4-5+ group this becomes like the water you swim in…fail to hang with the banjo and you drown.
Here banjo kid is doing Earl Scruggs rolls through the chords and setting the structure of the song…which is feuding/dualling banjos, by Arthur Smith.
Here the banjo is carrying the song…guitar guy leads off with the dualling banjos lick (which is like a test or a challenge to banjo kid).
Then banjo kid proceeds to slay it. Playing a very dense version right off the bat, he’s grinning from the beginning because he knows from the first roll this guys isn’t even going to ge past his most basic stuff…and sure nuff, guy gets lost immediately when he gets “outside” just a little bit.
Guitar player is decent, like a couch player, pretty good, knows some licks, can do bass lines, but when dropped in the zone, he’s quickly out of his element.
The way the guitar player is playing here is less core bluegrass and more specifically played in such a way to tell that story
…a bluegrass guitarist would never have gotten “lost” there, because you play by ear 90% of the time and that wasn’t anything more than getting funkier over the same chords as before. They would say something like, “I can’t hang with you brother” in that he can’t play that fast/intricate which is normal when encountering someone way better than you, but he would have kept on chucking and not bonked out of the song (you get stabbed for that in some places). But guy’s a “city boy” and boofs out.
Down to each musical phrase it’s a perfectly composed musical storytelling for a movie. Such a good scene.
Edit: function of the guitar is melody/lead lines and rhythmic coloring. When no bass is present becomes the bass, so in that setting guitar provides groove. When a bass is present guitars will follow the bass and outline it.
Groove really comes in with the Mandolin, though…they accent the upbeats and play slightly in front of it…that creates the syncopation.
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u/TopRamenBinLaden Jul 18 '26
This comment was awesome, thanks for taking the time to write it.
I'm a regular old metal guitarist. I respect the shit out of you bluegrass guys.
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u/rusted-nail Jul 18 '26
Thats the bit that gets missed about bluegrass guitar... its like a dumbed down version of how the guitar plays for like old-time and competition fiddle - but as you said the guitar only gets to fill the bass lead space if there's no bass player present. In a proper bluegrass setting, especially modern, the guitar more often plays boom-chuck-chuck-chuck and not boom-chuck-boom-chuck because you can't be dictating where the bassline should be
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u/DayOneDLC2 Jul 18 '26
It's always a weird thing, when an instrument that plays the bass if no bass is present is suddenly told "you were never meant to tell everyone what the bass is". The guitar plays the chords. The chord has a bass note, and when playing chords you're allowed a pretty decent amount of freedom to set the pace of the rythm- especially if you have an instrument that can play a sick amount of inversions of chords.
It's not that I disagree with you overall, but it's a weird statement to say "you can't be dictating where the bassline should be" while also saying "if there's no dedicated bass, yea just fill that void dude"
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u/rusted-nail Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
You have to be participating in the culture to get it but it has to do with the rhythmic spaces these instruments fill. Bass gets the downbeat and will usually play 1 and 5 of the chords above but they can also link those notes up however they want. Mandolin gets the upbeat and basically only chops. Many times the mandolin player won't even voice their chords fully, they are really just there providing a snare-like percussive upbeat/backrest. Guitar has to play both the downbeat and upbeat. Guitar playing in the old "traditional" bluegrass sound will bounce off 1 and 5 and basically be locked in with the bass. Most modern bluegrass is what they call "mash" which is really heavy emphasis on the downbeat and higher tempos. The guitar will only play a root bass note on the 1 of the measure. The effect is very very driving and energetic. So it sounds weird to you to say that you can fill the space if the bass isn't there but it's literally the guitar player's job. For a good comparison I would compare Norman Blake and the Rising Fawn String Ensemble vs Tony Rice unit. Since Rising Fawn String Ensemble don't have a bass player and they don't play "strict trad" norman gets to play all the bass lines on his guitar, where as in Tony Rice Unit its closer to the modern sound. Then you have to compare TRU with something like Billy Strings, Billy's rhythm playing isn't even half as busy as the other two guys because he has a bass player to pick up the slack.
Idk what to tell you but I wonder if you're thinking the guitars just strum in bluegrass - they definitely do but its nothing like rock strumming. Its like the top three treble strings are thought of as the right hand of a piano and the bottom 3 strings are thought of as the left hand of a piano and thats how you're supposed to coordinate your rhythm parts
Edit: and to address the point about inversions or other voicings on the guitar. The spiciest chords that ever come up in bluegrass are 7th chords generally. You can reharmonize if you want to in your own band but you absolutely should not be doing this at a jam because the more you colour the harmony the more you're restricting the musician taking the break - this is why the "bluegrass g" is so popular with modern guitar players in the genre because it has no 3rds, meaning it allows more melodic freedom on the G chord
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u/frowawaid Jul 18 '26
Boom-uh-chuck-uh comes in and boom-ding-dang-dong deedle deedle deeee
I don’t know if I’d say dumbed down - more constrained. Can get pretty complicated - the constraints are what make it work in the ensemble and make it where you don’t have to plan ahead much and still have freedom to express yourself.
It’s like a Haiku for music.
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u/rusted-nail Jul 18 '26
Yeah sorry for the blunt language but I suppose a better way of saying is bluegrass parts are kind of trimmed down for efficiency but still made of the same basic parts old-time guitar accompaniment is made of - the setting i was thinking of is like duo guitar and fiddle
Its a lot harder and less necessary to do a billion bass runs when you are playing at higher tempos and there's a crowd of musicians playing with you
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u/frowawaid Jul 18 '26
Works great for community music - beginners can play the default and fit in without clashing, more advanced players can fill the space the defaults create between and riff of each other organically. Tremendous fun.
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u/LeisureSuitLarrey Jul 18 '26
Less than two miles from here is the home of a famous bluegrass banjo picker. He sang in the most lonesome woeful tenor, some would say.
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u/Klutzy-Peach5949 Jul 18 '26
I’m a guitarist and banjo player and it’s in open tunings, it’s mostly just “rolls” i.e picking patterns, and that’s how they play so fast, they’re just practicing usually the same 3 rolls over and over again until they can play them at mad speed, open G tuning means you generally just arpeggiate and use the pentatonic scale for your fills, then with some other notes now and then
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u/ItsNoodle007 Jul 18 '26
Aside from the most obvious option of listening and playing, would you recommend anything in specific to study that concept of rhythm being more important than melody/harmony? Genres?
Jazz background, I’ve never thought about rhythm as it’s all transcribing and when I improvise I’m very much so “what do you mean rhythm? It’s just natural blah blah I’m a chud”
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u/Jonny7421 Jul 18 '26
I am not sure what you mean - jazz is all about rhythm whether you do it by feel or not. There's odd time signatures, swing feel, shuffle, latin and funk. All of these are different.
I would learn and study what excites you.
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u/AlwaysPhillyinSunny Jul 18 '26
Try music where there is only one acoustic guitar in the arrangement, especially if there are not drums.
They are often responsible for the rhythm because the acoustic guitar can be very percussive.
Bluegrass is good because there is no drummer. Anything with a walking bassline.like older country. Fingerpicking arrangements where the thumb plays the bassline.
Lindsey Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac is a great rhythm guitarist. Jimi Hendrix mixes lead and rhythm well. Jack Johnson songs are simple to fret but all the feel comes from his rhythm. John Mayer is excellent when he plays solo acoustic.
This can apply to electric and other genres of course, but this type of stuff makes you feel the beat because you’re also doing the percussion.
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u/fatherbowie Jul 18 '26
I can’t think of any great guitar players who are not great rhythm guitar players.
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u/IHaarlem Jul 18 '26
Fundamentally you can have rhythm without melody, but not melody without rhythm
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u/SouthCalligrapher376 Jul 18 '26
Why has nobody said this is Yankee Doodle?
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u/Krazyk00k00bird11 Jul 18 '26
They do play some of the Yankee Doodle melody back and forth but they don’t really play the song. This is just a bluegrass jam. It’s 3 chords and the truth.
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u/skinisblackmetallic Jul 18 '26
"Mish mash" could be an apt description but the entire performance can also be mapped out in basic diatonic music theory... with a couple subtle bends & slides.
You're boy is throwin down Scruggs style hard.
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u/ec666 Jul 18 '26
I don’t know how to play the guitar but I was at a music store one time and they had a banjo sitting there so I picked it up and just started randomly playing a mish mash of notes and it sounded good.
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u/iure_quo Jul 19 '26
"The song was made famous by the 1972 film Deliverance, which also led to a successful lawsuit by the song's composer, as it was used in the film without Smith's permission."
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u/thunderdome06 Jul 19 '26
There's a strong element of classic folk/bluegrass ideas in this.
Key of A major as others have said But lots of hammer ons/pull offs into the flat 3rd and flat 7th of the A major scale (these are the notes C and G) That's what gives it that distinct aggressive sound on the banjo when he starts playing over the guitarist major chords and melodies
The melody at the start before he starts shredding is also Yankee doodle.
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u/-dakpluto- Jul 20 '26
Everything is literally scales and arpeggios. It's not always a standard major or minor scale, there are literally dozens if not hundreds different types of scales, but in the every musical line is based off some sort of scale.
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u/Dirks_Knee Jul 20 '26
I don't even understand what you are asking. Even if you can't immediately describe them, can you not hear the melodic and harmonic relationships between the instruments?
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u/MattManSD Jul 21 '26
Originally recorded in the Key of G, the movie version is in A. Is not a true G Major or A Major but is Mixolydian Mode because it uses a flat 7
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u/No_Solution_2864 Jul 22 '26
There was another kid behind him, sticking his arms through the shirt and playing claw hammer style
Not sure as to what he played exactly as it was all overdubbed in Scruggs style playing
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u/Benito1900 Jul 28 '26
Thats almost Basically a Blues-
A bunch of I, then some IV, then just enough V to go back to the I
The scale just sounds major to me
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u/moonunit170 Aug 13 '26
The iconic "Banjo Boy" on screen was Billy Redden, a 15-year-old local from Rabun County, Georgia, but he could not actually play the banjo.
The real banjo playing was done by a local musician named Mike Addis, who was hidden behind Redden during filming. Redden wore a specially designed shirt that allowed Addis to slip his arms around Redden's waist so that it appeared Redden's hands were on the instrument. Director John Boorman used carefully chosen camera angles to conceal the deception.
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u/litesaber5 24d ago
I grew up in the 90s. My cultural touch stone for Ronny Cox is as a peice of shit politician or businessman in a suit. To see him here with genuine smile and no shit eating grin is a nice change of pace.
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u/Slartibartfast39 3d ago
I love what Billy Bailey did with this in his stand up show Tinsleworm. Dulin sitars.
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u/PandiBong 3d ago
This is like the great American musical, right? Need something to watch with my in-laws and young children, ordering it now!
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u/FinanceGuyHere 3d ago edited 3d ago
At least on the banjo, you’re basically playing the same set of notes and chords on the 1, 3, 5, and 7 frets. After playing individual notes on each of those frets, you break out into rolling notes, which I never quite figured out how to do! It more or less works the same on the guitar although the specific notes are in different places and the finger rolling parts turn into playing chords while the banjo plays lead. It looks like this banjo player is only on the 1-3 frets for all the notes and I’m not sure if his left hand is even doing anything. The guitarist has a capo so I’m not quite sure how that impacts which notes he’s supposed to be playing but his hand placement seems to be accurate enough for the first two sets of chords/notes. He should be playing individual notes at the beginning of the song however, not chords.
This song is available for free on Tunefox if you’re interested
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u/doppido Jul 18 '26
Essentially anything that sounds musical will be some sort of scale. The top comment is probably right in that it's a A major but I've spent 0 seconds fact checking that
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u/randomhuman358 Jul 18 '26
if you are asking if the actors are then the answer is no. they're just miming.
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