I was very amused recently by a cartoon from an up and coming cartoonist some of you may know. It shows a guy kneeling for his evening prayers and the guy asks the Lord, (if it’s not too much trouble), please don’t let there be too many tunes in Bb or F in tomorrow night’s jam. I can really sympathize with that poor fellow because Bb has always been the bane of my existence as a jammer. In my opinion it shouldn’t be a key at all, they should just skip over it altogether.
Bb is perfectly fine if you play a band instrument like the clarinet or the trumpet. Your tuning centers there anyway and you can just play in “C”, You’re there already. But if you happen to be a pianist in a jazz band with trumpets and trombones, God help you. Well, at least there aren’t as many black keys as there would be in Eb.
In a Bluegrass jam situation, you banjoists, guitarists and Dobroists don’t have any idea what the rest of us are going through when the dreaded Bb is called. You simply position your capos at the appropriate fret and you never have to actually play in that Devil’s key! I’m telling you, you folks have no idea what torture it can be for the rest of us (bassists, fiddlers and mandolinists).
If, like me, you happen to play that big fiddle, that little fiddle, or that fretted guitar that wants to be a fiddle, you have a natural predilection to the sharp keys. Ever notice how many fiddle tunes are written in G or D or A? Those sharp keys give the GDAE tuned instruments lots of opportunities for open strings. Just to refresh your memories, G has one sharp, D has two sharps, A has three sharps and E has four sharps. Sharps are good! Flats are bad!
I do know of a few fiddle tunes that are often played in Bb (College Hornpipe and Daley’s Reel for example). Just between you and me, that’s just a bunch of hot shot fiddlers showing off. Who needs that? When I first heard Daley’s Reel, I absolutely loved the tune. I struggled to play it in Bb and eventually just gave up. So I transposed it to D and now it’s absolute butter! That tune should have been there all along.
I try to keep an open mind, so I do try Bb from time to time. For the mandolin, Bb is just a fret over from F. I sing in F a lot because of my voice’s natural range. So if I can play in F, I should be able to handle Bb right? Wrong. My buddy Marcos Alvira gave me a crash course a couple of years ago to get me over that mental block. It helped a lot but, but I have to confess. Two weeks later I was using a banjo capo at the first fret so I could play in C.
Let’s all face it. Bb is not a real key. If your singing voice just has to be in that forbidden key, well give me a few minutes and I’ll tune a half step up, like so many of the Bluegrass masters no doubt did. Then I’ll be playing in C. No problem.
Just don’t make me play in Bb.
