New Banjos for January 2010
January 27th, 2010 | No Comments
Hi folks -
We’re back from a great tour from San Francisco to Victoria with our old time stringband The Haints and a very special guest Carl Jones. What a wonderful time was had – thank you to all the folks who came out, the incredible people who helped us put on the shows and fed us delicious food and gave us soft beds to sleep in. Carl Jones was a real treat to play music with – his songwriting and musicianship are so very inspiring. There are some videos up on youtube.com of a few shows from this tour.
In the meantime though, we’re just getting a chance to post the banjos that we shipped out right before we left on tour (and one gourd that we built back in December).
A gourd banjo with maple flush frets, cherry neck, and chechen trim. The customer also wanted a small brass cap over the end of the dowel stick to protect it from any damage. It was fun to get build a gourd again, it had been a while.
09211 – 11″ Cherry Banjeaurine
An 11″ cherry rim and neck, with a short 19 5/8″ banjeaurine scale. Aged brass hardware, copper and brass inlay, and chechen trim rounded out this little banjo. It was the first banjeaurine we’ve had a chance to make, and the short scale length made for a much tighter sound as expected. The radiused fingerboard also made this a really fun to build and play banjo. The customer had several banjeaurines already and was very happy with how this one turned out – we’d love to build more of these.
The customer wanted a classically beautiful banjo. He sent on some 30+ year old Brazilian rosewood which we were more than happy to use, with enough to do all the trim – fingerboard, peghead, heel and potcaps – of the darkly beautiful wood. The claro walnut bent rim and one-piece neck, which is fast becoming one of our favorite woods to use, complemented the darkness of the Brazilian. We drew up an inlay pattern based off an early Elite banjo with some influences from a Broadway, all out of gold mother-of-pearl. Lightly aged raw brass and bronze hardware, Honduran rosewood tonering, and a dark stained skin rounded it out. The banjo sounded warm and round, very responsive. Set up for clawhammer style playing.
12″ Black walnut rim and neck with pau ferro trim and raw brass hardware. This customer visited our shop before we started the building process and saw some large boards of pau ferro, or Bolivian rosewood, and fell in love with the grainlines. Having already decided on black walnut she decided that the brown on brown tones were exactly what she was looking for. She sent on a beautiful drawing of her peghead design, but was express in wanting it in muted tones, which matched beautifully with the brown towns of the wood. You can see the original drawing and the finished inlay below. The tone was similar to the 12″ claro walnut banjo above, round, woody and open sounding with plenty of volume.
