Noam Pikelny

While the banjo player for the Punch Bros, perhaps the most successful young(ish) group to be playing anything remotely relevant to bluegrass, is rightly regarded as a technical virtuoso and a truly experimental artist with a mastery of the five-string banjo fretboard and a skill for single-string improvisation…
*deep breath* he’s got his licks, just like everyone else.
The trick, though, is in the right hand. Boy, his left hand knows what it’s doing, but a closer examination of Noam Pikelny’s right hand at a recent show revealed a startling surprise, an insight into why his runs and fills are so ear-catching and unusual.
He’s playing upside-down.
No, not physically. When Earl Scruggs pioneered this new sound of 3-finger playing – that is, thumb, index, and middle – he led, not always but predominantly, with the thumb. A major identifiable Scruggs roll is thumb-index-thumb-middle, or T I T M, where the thumb moves to different strings. A similar sounding roll would start off with T I M I, and another with T I M T.
But Noam? He will play that T I M I roll, over and over, on the chord, like everyone else, except he plays it inverted, as M I T I. This creates a sound that is less root-heavy and more about beats 2 and 4. It’s unfamiliar, it’s clarifying, and people like it.