A little bit more on chord substitutions in "Cold Frosty Morning" (and Clifftop)

Last week, I talked about putting a little bit of pizazz (...surely thats not the correct spelling of that word....) into "Cold Frosty Morning" by putting F major chords into the B part where most people play A minor chords; click here to view that post. Putting an F major chord into "Cold Frosty Morning" was not an original idea on my part - rather I heard a guitarist do it when the tune was called at a local jam and just had to figure out how to mimic that on banjo. This week, I'll continue that tale with a bit of reminiscing from Clifftop (if you don't feel like humoring me here, I won't be offended - simply scroll down and skip the next few paragraphs for more banjo-centric content : )

***insert ascending whole-tone scale played on a harp to signal that a flashback is imminent***

As I mentioned in my "back from Clifftop post" (here), people play music nearly 24 hours at Clifftop: from around 9 am till about 5 or 6 am (yes there are a few oddly-quiet hours each morning where most are drinking coffee...or trying to sleep). By Friday night, after nearly a week of camping and jamming, I was just about spent. It was ~11:30 pm and I was wandering around in the dark doing just a little bit of listening before a relatively early night in bed. Passing the "impromptu square-dance shelter" near the vendors, I heard an amazing sound: an incredibly-loud mandolin noodling on fiddle tunes was coming out of the dark. It sounded so cool that my first instinct was to not disturb....but after a few  minutes, I decided that I'd have to join in! At this point it should be noted that I've shamefully forgotten this guy's name - I'll just call him "Mando-guy" for the rest of this post.

Playing with Mando-guy was initially a little awkward - despite the fact that we were at Clifftop, I kinda thought he was a bluegrass player so I was trying to pick "crossover tunes" - I think we did "Cherokee Shuffle" (the bluegrass flavored version in A), "Red Haired Boy," and "Whiskey Before Breakfast" and I was trying to trade leads with him in kind of a heavy-handed way. However, I eventually realized that he was not a cookie-cutter mandolin player - when I was playing leads, he favored tremolo-ed harmonies over standard "chops" on chords, and he was definitely not afraid of a little exploration. Furthermore, he started calling old time fiddle tunes, and soon enough, we were starting to sound pretty good!

As an aside, it also turns out Mando-guy was actually playing a mandolin banjo (aka banjo mandolin, banjo-lin, etc) - a classic tubaphone that had somehow never been converted to a 5 string! I have tried playing mandolin banjos several times and simply do not care for the sound as a rule; I always thought that doubled strings just weren't meant to be put on a banjo body, but this thing sounded amazing! This is probably as much the player's fault as the instrument's - Mando-guy has likely found exactly the right pick attack to bring a sweet sound out of his instrument.

Eventually, we came across "Cold Frosty Morning" and I found myself playing a lot of rhythm so I thought "what the heck, I'm going to try the F chord trick I learned the other day." Mando-guy latched onto this very quickly - we started putting dynamics into the tune and the F major walkup section I focused on last week became about 2x as loud as anything else. Then, Mando-guy made a choice that in retrospect should have seemed kinda obvious: he started putting F major chords in the A part as well! 

***Insert chromatic scale played on a mandolin banjo to get us back to the present***

In case you scrolled past my reminiscing, the flashback ended with a banjo mandolin player (aka "Mando-guy") I was jamming with introducing an F major chord in the A part of "Cold Frosty Morning" and me thinking "I can't believe I didn't think of that!" But why did I have that reaction?

To answer this question I'll start by pointing out that many simple fiddle tunes have a nice bit of symmetry to them: the A and B parts end on the same phrases. This device helps tie the A and B parts together into one tune, but this can be overkill on occaision - for example, as much as I love "Red Haired boy," the A and B parts only differ by the first phrase meaning that the last 3/4 of the A and B parts are identical (resulting in it a slightly monotonous tune). "Cold Frosty Morning" is a little more tasteful in that only the last 1/4 of the A and B parts are melodically identical. However, there is something a little more subtle going on in the harmony because the last 3/4 of the chords normally applied to the A and B parts are identical. To illustrate what I'm talking about, the "normal" chords (i.e. without an F major substitution) to "Cold Frosty Morning" are indicated below:

​A part (x2):
Am    Am     Am    Am
G       G         G       G
Am    Am     Am    Am
Am    G        Am    Am

​B part (x2):
A        A        A        A
G       G         G       G
Am    Am     Am    Am
Am    G        Am    Am

In fact, if you get rid of the A major for A minor substitution normally played at the beginning of the B part (once again, discussed in last weeks post on chord substitutions, available by clicking here), the harmonic accompaniment between the A and B parts becomes completely identical (i.e. it would be harmonically-acceptable to simply play the A part chords for both parts).

Since we talked about swapping the A minors for F majors in the B part last week, logic dictates that this should work for the A part as well right? Mando-guy gave it a shot, with less-than-stellar results (at first). Though I understand Mando-guy's logic here, the F major substitution that worked so well in the B part doesnt actually work all that well in the A part. To figure out why, lets look at the melodic phrase that begin's the 3rd line of the A part:

Beginning of the 3rd line of the A part of "Cold Frosty Morning" as its normally played on banjo;
​this phrase does NOT sound particularly good with an F major chord behind it.

One problem with backing the above phrase with an F major occurs on beat 4: Here I normally do an open "A minor-ish" (actually root, 4th, 5th) strum, which would definitely clash with an F major chord. However, this is not actually part of the melody and we could easily replace it with a "ghost stroke" or F major chord, both of which were discussed last week. But this is not the main cause of the dissonant sound I hear when playing an F major chord behind this phrase; rather, it is the melody note on beat 1 (open 4th string, E natural) that really sticks out and ruins the F major substitution in my opinion. This is because E natural is only a half-step from F natural (the root of the F major chord). While my ears often crave the half-step dissonance of a minor third in front of a major chord in blues music (the so-called blue-note) and beyond, I really don't care for the sound of a chord harmonized with a note a half step below its root, especially in the context of old time music.

​So what do we do here? My desire for harmonic symmetry makes me want to find room for an F major in the A part if I'm going to put one in the B part, but the F major chord clashes with the A part melody. The way I see it there are 3 options:

1) abandon the F major chord in the B part (....but it sounds so cool!)
2) let the symmetry of the A and B parts diverge (....​don't know if I can handle that in the long term)
3) (*gasp*) change the melody to fit the F major chord in the A part

As you may have guessed, I went with option 3. I really wanted the F major chord in the A part and putting it in there wasn't actually that hard. I simply changed the offending E natural (open 4th string) to an F natural (1st fret 4th string) to get rid of the dissonant half step clash that offended my ear. Here's the resulting tab of that section:

Beginning of the 3rd line of the A part of "Cold Frosty Morning" with the melody altered to accommodate an F major chord. Also, notice the F major strum on the 4th beat.

So (brief return to Clifftop), after a couple of rounds of Mando-guy stressing an F-major chord in the A part of "Cold Frosty Morning" I came upon this solution (though I'm not sure I ever executed it flawlessly in the moment since you'll see that requires a bit of a hand position switch when you check out the tab below). Though some people may see my "melody edit" as blasphemy, I absolutely love this version of "Cold Frosty Morning" and I'll spread the F major substitution gospel by posting this tab for anyone who wants to try it:

Click Here for a tab of "Cold Frosty Morning" that accommodates F major substitutions in the A and B parts.

A couple of comments on the above tab:

1) Hand position is once again critical (see my post on Left Hand Postiions by clicking here if you're confused as to what I'm talking about). I normally play the entire A part of this tune with my fingers covering frets 2-5 (index through pinky), but obviously this doesn't allow me to effectively hit the F natural note on the 1st fret of the 4th string, so I have to switch positions in the middle of the A part (totally worth it in my opinion).

2) I spiced up the B part walk up that I dissected to death last week (once again, click here to view that post) by putting in Hammer ons to the fretted notes - not a big difference in effort but its a bit more appealing to listen to in my opinion.

3) (In case it wasn't clear) this tab is meant to go with a revised set of "Cold Frosty Morning" chords, with F majors substituted in (as follows):

​​A part (x2):
Am    Am     Am    Am
G       G         G       G
F        F         F        F
F        G        Am    Am

B part (x2):
A       A         A        A
G       G         G       G
F        F         F        F
F        G        Am    Am

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to make a video of me playing through this tab before leaving town (I'm spending a week in Montreal!) so I'll have to upload that in a later post. As for my trip, I did bring my banjo with me: I hope to attend a couple of jams this week and with any luck I can hear some awesome Quebecois fiddling! ​