I'm new-ish to the clawhammer style of play and I've been intrigued by the many threads discussing the variety of tunings. Most of my previous banjo playing has been bluegrass and Seeger style, out of the open G. Since I've begun messing around with clawhammer style, I've experimented with a couple of other tuning styles, but I now have a couple of questions with regards to jamming with others.
1) When jamming with others, do you just stick to one tuning, or do you ask others to wait while you re-tune your banjo to the favored tuning for a particular song? It seems like that could get very old, very fast.
2) For a particular song, do you learn it in several tunings (so that you can be ready to play without having to re-tune) or do most folks just know how to play a song in one particular tuning?
3) How do you improvise? For example, for me, I know open G so well, that I can take leads, even if I don't know a song very well. But in other tunings, I really just memorize a song in that tuning...I don't really know my way around the fretboard in that tuning. Do others know all of the other tuning so well that they can just jam at will and fly around the keyboard? How do you play back-up in an alternative tuning? Or are folks just playing what they've memorized. It seems that one can spend a lifetime mastering one tuning (witness the guitar), how can you master many?