Playing a banjo with five strings

My acquaintance with the fivestring banjo goes back to the days when I was a kid, listening to some of my fathers country records. It’s a bit classic, but on one of these records I discovered a banjo instrumental called Foggy Mountain Breakdown. The song blew me away and I was hooked ever since...
I refer to the banjo as ‘fivestring banjo’ and not ‘bluegrass banjo’. Of course, this type of banjo is used in bluegrassmusic, but the fivestring banjo is not only a banjo for bluegrass. It’s used in different types of music, even in pop and rock music. It’s an instrument with unlimited possibilities.
There’s also another type of fivestring banjo without a resonator, called an oldtime or open back banjo. It’s used in the oldtime folkmusic.

The most common style of playing a fivestring resonator banjo is with a plastic thumbpick and two metal fingerpicks for the index- and middlefinger. It’s a so called three-fingerstyle that is known as Scruggsstyle, named after Earl Scruggs who developed this style of playing. Scruggstyle means playing rolls, a repeated pattern of notes. There are several basis rolls (patterns), but we will cover that later, in an another article.
There were other three-fingerstyle players in his time and before (Earl was first recorded in 1946) but the style of Scruggs was a innovative approach of the banjo and has influenced generations of fivestring banjoists.
The melodic style appeared somewhere in the 1950s, introduced by Bill Keith and Bobby Thompson (†). This style involves playing only melody notes, note for note fiddle tunes. This style is different from the Scruggsstyle (a roll has only a few melody notes, the rest of the notes are ‘fill-inn’ notes to add drive to the music).
A third style is the single stringstyle: this style is similar to flat-picking lead guitar, but instead of using a flat pick you alternate right hand fingers on individual strings.