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| Our newest banjos |
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| #11257
10″ mahogany neck and rim with ebony trim on an A-scale fretless. |
#11258
11″ figured maple neck and rim, chechen binding, Sanscrit Om inlay. |
#11259
11″ Claro walnut neck and rim, chechen trim, Oregon wildflower inlay. |
#11261
12″ Claro walnut neck and rim, maple burl trim, ebony fingerboard. |
#11262
11″ figured maple neck and rim, ziricote trim, kingfisher inlay. |
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Five banjos, built and finished for a variety of players and banjo needs. #11257, made for a customer in Maryland, was designed as a light banjo for traveling, with a rich throaty tone and easy set-up for playing on the 10″ pot and fretless neck. The rest of this group of banjos went out to folks in British Columbia, Illinois, Alberta and Japan, respectively. #11258 was made with a slightly smaller profile neck and Om inlay, representing the first sound made. #11259 matched Oregon wildflower inlay on the fretless fingerboard with the Oregon Claro walnut used in the neck and rim. #11261 incorporated our recessed nouveau J-shoes, set into the maple burl pot cap, and brass hardware to match the brass scoop inlay. #11262 used dark stained figured maple to contrast with the ziricote trim, and we inlayed a kingfisher in the peghead with a small trout in the 5th fret.
We built one more banjo with this group, #11260, as a personal banjo for Jason. A beautiful and unique banjo, we’ll be sending out a separate newsletter shortly, detailing the build and the ideas leading to this completed instrument. We’re very excited about this banjo!
 Now building orders received in December 2009 and January 2010.
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News from the banjo shop
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 It has been a great spring here in the Cariboo. Though the snow is apparently late in leaving (this is our first spring so we don’t have a reference time, but that’s what everyone is telling us), the birds are plentiful and there’s more ground without snow on it than with. We spent yesterday evening putting up swallow houses for the tree and violet-green swallows, who have just returned. They’re beautiful graceful birds, and they eat their fair share of mosquitoes.
We had a great time teaching at the Cabin Fever Bluegrass Workshop a couple weekends ago. A really nice spot for a camp (a blugrass camp with a swimming pool and yoga?!?), and good music played every day.
We’re headed out to record a new album in a few weeks, of the two of us singing and playing the music we love – early country and old time and originals, with banjos, guitars, and Jason’s well loved National resophonic. We hope to have the finished record in hand by the end of June.
Other News
An Extra Banjo
We’re working on another banjo to sell directly from the site, with a Claro walnut neck and 12″ rim, maple burl trim, and cherry blossom inlay on the fingerboard. If you are interested,  please contact us. We’ll have photos available around the end of the month.
T-shirts
New t-shirts are now in – thanks to those who have been patiently waiting. We printed the same design as the last run, but in white this time. Available in men’s sizes S – XXL.
Bridges
We have both our standard compenated bridges and our extra compensated bridges available for sale on our website. Jason is using these extra compensated bridges on all his fingerstyle banjos, and swears by them.
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| Standard Compensated Bridge |
Extra-Compensated Bridge |
Jason came up with this bridge design about ten years ago. He wanted a marriage between the Moon bridges, already on the market, and the 5-hole design that he first saw being used by a wonderful banjo builder named Monty Hendricks (who is still building incredible instruments). Monty used a single foot base with the 5-hole, and after much experimentation Jason found that the 3-foot base transferred more precise tone through the head. Though the single foot bridges are arguably stronger, the tone wasn’t the same as the traditional 3-foot. We use submerged birch or maple as the body wood; we’ve found no better wood for sound transmission. The bridges are topped with ebony or chechen (pictures above show ebony), and we do offer untopped bridges for a slightly warmer sound. The untopped bridges are particularly suited for banjos where the owners want to cut some of the overtones. We’ve seen our 5-hole 3-foot bridge design in use on a wide variety of banjos over the last years. Bridges are available to order on our website. When ordering, please specify your bridge height.
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| #11253
12″ mahogany neck and rim with cocobolo trim, Dobson tonering. |
#11254
11″ figured maple neck and rim, ziricote trim, stars & dove inlay. |
#11255
12″ figured maple neck and rim, ebony trim, maple binding and trillium inlay. |
#11256
11″ cherry neck and rim, ebony fingerboard, amboyna burl trim. |
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This is our first batch started and finished in this new year, so all serial numbers have switched over to the “11″ series (the first two numbers indicate the year our banjos are built). We’re celebrating nine years of building this year. This group was an interesting batch of banjos, and diverse. As always, our customers are great to work with, and we love creating these instruments, unique to each personality.
Now building orders received in November & December 2009.
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News from the banjo shop
 We’ve had a lot of snow and some cold days in the last month, hitting -35′C (-31′F) some nights. It’s been a great first winter to be back here in the British Columbia interior. The workshop is warm – we’re heating it with a large wood stove (and a propane furnace back-up at night) – and we haven’t yet gone through the 8 cords of wood in the woodshed. We have been out x-country skiing nearly every day, though the moose and deer seem to really like our ski trails, and they sure make a mess of them. We’ve had plenty of deer, moose, and swans around. As March comes and the thoughts of spring and the summer camp season start to appear, we’ll be out teaching in March at the 108 Cabin Fever Bluegrass Workshop, a couple hours south of us.
We’ve been wanting to make an extra banjo every once in a while to sell directly from the website, and the first one is finished, and sold quickly – #11253. It’s a lightly built instrument with a Dobson tonering; we find that the Dobson tonerings work to their full potential on a lightly built instrument. We used mahogany for the neck and the rim, and our smallest L-shoes, the Vega reproductions, to keep the weight down. The unstained mahogany gives a nice contrast to the cocobolo trim, as the cocobolo will oxidize even darker over time.
 Other New Stuff
We’ve just finished a new L-shoe – the model for it is to the left. Inspired by fans and wall sconces from the art deco period, it will have a good amount of L-shoe-to-rim contact above the point where it attaches to the rim, giving it excellent stability. We plan to have it ready for production in month or so.
We’re also working on a custom set of strings for clawhammer playing, which will be the same as the specialty set that we install on nearly every new banjo in our workshop (but have only been able to order in bulk). We hope to have these ready for sale in a couple months – we’re very excited about these new strings! |
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Hi folks -
Our apologies this post is up late – we’ll attempt to get the next one out closer to when the next batch banjos is ready (which will be really soon).
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| #10248
11″ figured maple, with a classic point inlayed of fossilized walrus tusk. |
#10249
11″ claro walnut neck and rim, chechen trim, Romero tonering and arctic flower inlay. |
#10250
12″ figured maple neck and rim, Brazilian rosewood trim, and rounded J-shoes. |
#10251
10″ banjolin with claro walnut neck, ebonized cherry rim, lightly aged brass and bronze hardware |
#10252
Claro walnut neck and resonator, hard rock maple rim, Honduran rosewood tonering |
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This most recent batch of banjos was very diverse. We were finishing up a banjo ukelele while starting this group, which included a banjolin, resonator banjo, and three open-backs. We had a chance with this batch to include one personal banjo for Jason, a new 12″ figured maple open-back. It was a pleasure as well to get to build another banjolin. This one was a little different than our last – shorter scale length, brass and bronze hardware, and a fyberskin head. It sounded great.
Now building orders received in November 2009.
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| News from the banjo shop |
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 We came home from the Portland Old Time Gathering earlier this week. It was an amazing long weekend, with incredible musicians and good people everywhere. A banjo makers hangout, Brooks Masten, Colin Vance, Doc Huff were all there – and we had some time to go stock up on walnut and cherry with Brooks (any time spent with Brooks is time well spent).
We’re back in the shop and raring to go on this month’s new batch of banjos. In the meantime though, we came home to a whole lot of new snow and have been clearing paths to get to the shop and get firewood. The mallards, dippers, and trumpeter swans are on the lake, keeping wary of the eagles and otters. And with the days getting longer already, we’re going to try and cut a new ski trail through the fresh powder.
On another note, we’ve decided to build a non-spec banjo whenever we can – hopefully every two months. We focus entirely on custom orders every month, and love building our custom banjos, but we’re really excited about this decision to build banjos inspired by new ideas, for sale directly from the workshop. Keep an eye out on the website as we’ll put new banjos online as they’re finished. There’s one in the works right now….
 New Stuff
We’ve got some more hardware in the works. A new 5-string tailpiece out of thick brass stock rather than our usual cast bronze. And a banjo-mando tailpiece, also out of thick brass. And….. new t-shirts! We’re going with another short run, only 24 printed, and they’re going quick. They may be our favorite yet. Men’s sizes S – XXL. Only $20 plus mailing – order them from our site. |
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We’ve decided to sell two personal banjos. We’d love to see them go to a great home – and with these banjos you won’t have to wait a year for a new one. Please give us an email or call at (250) 929-7099 for prices and more info.
#0437 – Santos Mahogany resonator banjo. For more photos and info, click here.
From Jason: I decided to let go of one the first bluegrass banjos I made for myself. It’s been in my collection for a while – just over six years – and has been my primary player at every bluegrass gig I’ve played. It has some light dings and scratches throughout as you would expect. The frets have all been milled recently, all the parts cleaned and the head replaced with a new Huber head. It’s a great sounding and easy playing banjo. Spikes installed at 7, 9 and 10. It’s set up with an 11/16″ submerged maple bridge; the nut width is 1 5/16″ (a full 1/8″ wider than standard Gibson bluegrass banjos). Comes with a TKL hardshell case that does show a bit of wear. I’m sorry to see it go, but I decided to make a new one for myself this summer and would like to see this banjo go to a good home…
#10230 – 10″ Black walnut banjo ukelele – for more info and photos, click here.
A freshly made banjo tenor ukelele. Strung up with Aquila nylgut ukelele strings, this is a special little instrument. We hand cut and shaped the brass 4-string tailpiece, as well as brass star-shaped washers inside the rim. Continuing with the star theme, it has cast bronze star L-shoes, and in the peghead we inlayed graduated stars of amboyna burl, maple burl, rosewood and ebony. The geared violin tuners work really easily and look great. It’s a very sweet sounding banjo. And for those of you who are looking to play some clawhammer ukelele, it has a scoop as well.
 Jason with a James Ashborn banjo Earlier this year we had a very kind invitation from Hank Schwartz to visit his home and his amazing banjo collection, just south of San Francisco. It was quite an experience, with his collection ranging from antebellum curiosities to late 1800’s one-offs by unknown makers to the most ornate Fairbanks and Coles. And of course, several James Ashborns…..
We left there with a deep gratitude to Hank for the time we spent with him, and a whole lot of exciting ideas. Once home, Jason set to work building the banjo he’d been constructing in his head for months, adding on some inspiration from the experience of being able to examine such a varied and beautiful collection of banjos first hand.
(click on each image to view a larger version)
Jason’s initial ideas for this banjo were that he wanted a lightly built instrument, meant to be strung up with nylon strings, intended for lower tunings, and an overall dark look. For woods we went with some beautiful marbled claro walnut; 25.5″ scale length, flush frets, with a 12″ rim.
The rim was thin, 1/4″ single ply claro walnut. Dobson tonering (built by Bill Rickard). Single piece claro walnut neck, and figured claro walnut trim.
A new heel shape, inspired by some traditional guitar heel shapes – shorter and wider than our regular heel shape. You can just see the ends of the carves on either side of the base of the neck, and the slight curve in the neck profile where the scoop is.
Our first banjo with a longer backstrap. The banjo has bloodwood veneers under all the figured walnut trim. We used Pegheds tuners for the first time on this banjo – for both look and function they work great….
Our typical fifth string carve, and another view of the claro neck.
Figured claro walnut overlays. The inlay is Arts & Crafts inspired, with bloodwood, figured claro and ebony fans at the 1st and 12th frets. The flush frets are filled with bloodwood.
A new take on our J3 peghead shape, where the sides have a curved contour (rather than straight edges).
We’ve been carving our necks at the base, above the heel, where the neck meets the tension hoop, since the first banjo out of the Romero workshop. Here we’ve taken that same carve and sharpened it.
The scoop, showing the two-piece fingerboard of ebony and figured black walnut, with the bloodwood veneers. The idea behind the two-piece fingerboard was a practical design – we wanted to be able to show black walnut in the scoop, but had to also make sure that the truss rod was covered.
Inspired by minstrel banjo neck styles, the sides/top profile of the neck have a subtle decorative inverted carve where the scoop ends.
Brand new cast bronze rim fasteners. Definitely inspired by the variety on the early banjos in Hank Schwartz’s collection, we’re calling these our “Daisy” shoes. All the hardware is raw brass or bronze, and lightly aged.
Another view of the new L-shoes and lightly aged hardware (along with our custom tulip nuts and tension hoop).
We hand cut brass washers for the inside of the rim, mimicking the shape of the rim fasteners to make small daisy-shaped washers. These washers were out of thicker than normal brass.
A closer view of the daisy washers. You can also see the new 3-hole washer that connects the back two rim fasteners and the coordinator rod. These new washers will be included on every Romero banjo from now on… We love the look of it, and it also allows the washer that we normally use at the end of the coordinator rod to be fixed on the inside of every rim.
The finished banjo has a stained goatskin head, Savarez heavy tension nylon guitar strings, Romero 5-hole 3-foot bridge, cast bronze tailpiece.
This post is a bit late coming out – our apologies it’s taken a while, it’s been a zoo around here in the workshop and in life. We’re having a great time, that’s for sure!
February brought us some very exciting banjos, including a chance for Jason to build a new banjo for himself. We’ll talk more about that new banjo separately in another blog shortly… In the meantime though, here are our newest batch of banjos.
10216 – 11″ Ebonized maple rim and black walnut neck
A great combination of simplicity with an overall badass look. Blackened hardware, ebonized rim, dark stained skin. It was really nice to build a banjo with no inlay, letting the hardware and wood speak for themselves (not that we don’t love doing inlay!). It had a great sound, a combination our Romero tonering with the skin head, and set up to play very easily with a ton of volume.
10217 – 11″ Chechen rim and cherry neck
This was built for a friend of ours on his 60th birthday. He wanted a simple 11″, based off an earlier personal banjo we built, number 09185. A similar sounding banjo to the fretless, with the Romero tonering, but on the extremely dense chechen rim, giving for a warm, focused and very responsive banjo.
10218 – 12″ Black walnut
Made for a good friend, a wonderful fiddler, who wanted a new instrument in her life. Her only specifications were the cat inlay, dark woods and 12″ rim, so we took black walnut and stained it a shade darker for both the neck and rim to bring together this lovely banjo. The neck was profiled slightly smaller than a typical banjo from our workshop – something we offer for players who like the feel of a smaller neck. The cat inlay was inspired by early art nouveau cat images. A warm and alive banjo, with a wonderful low end, set up with slightly lighter gauge strings and lower action for her playing style.
10219 – 11″ Chechen rim and cherry neck
This banjo was made for a customer who wanted the focused sound of an 11″ rim with a tubaphone tonering set on the dense wood, chechen. When fingerpicked, this banjo had the power of a bluegrass style banjo, but because of the setup could be played and would respond well to a number of different attacks. A beekeeper, the customer wanted inlay that tied in fireweed (willowherb), bees, traditional beehives, a bee-friendly tree and a Dutch dathe bee smoker. We designed up a beautiful nouveau-inspired fireweed with honeybees flying in the traditional fingerboard markers up to the peghead, where the gradually smaller sized bee swarm wrapped around to the tree and hives on the back of the peghead.
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).
Flush Fret Gourd
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.
09214 – 12″ Claro Walnut
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.
09212 – 12″ Black Walnut
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.
Hi folks -
It’s been an incredibly busy year so far, and shows not many signs of slowing down yet. We’re heading down to California shortly, a two-week mini northwest tour with The Haints. Really looking forward to all the shows, especially the Portland Old Time Gathering.
More than all that though, we’re looking forward to a quieter spring and some time to develop new ideas we have rattling around in our heads. Aside from needing to make myself a couple new personal banjos, we’re excited about experimenting with a few things:
- rosewood core rims. We just got our first batch of these in from Melrose Music. I had the idea about 6 months ago about wanting to put a rosewood core in the centre of a 3-ply rim, with softer woods like mahogany, cherry and black walnut. The idea is that is a person really liked the look of these woods but was hoping to get the power that usually comes with a maple or solid rosewood banjo, that the rosewood core would be a good compromise. I’m not making any sound claims yet as I haven’t had time to experiment – even so I imagine it’s going to be hard to describe, but is another option to help us get the exact tone and look that someone is hoping for. We’ll keep you posted.
- a new resonator attachment system, using magnets!! If it all works out, these powerful magnets will be used to essentially have a pop-on resonator but without any attachment hardware.
- a baritone and a tenor ukelele
- a new close-backed wood-topped banjo, similar to what we’ve built before but with a removable closed back
- a 13″ guitar banjo is in the works as well
- new t-shirt ideas! We’ve got a couple limited edition shirt ideas going, where we only print 24 or so of each. They’ll be a little, well, different…
We’ve got a new tailpiece just about to arrive in the shop, and another couple L-shoes as well. There’s another tailpiece in the works too, and more L-shoes too! Pictures to come soon.
Happy new year to you all -
Jason and Pharis
09209 – 11″ Maple fretless with evening sky inlay
Price-wise, if we were to offer a student model banjo, this would be it. Without many of the numerous upgrades that we offer, this banjo was pretty stripped down, but in a good way. The only upgrade was a Romero tailpiece and a skin head, and the small amount of inlay on the fingerboard. It really sounded and played great; a beautifully simple fretless.
09210 – 12″ Figured maple with Day to Night inlay and rosewood binding
A very powerful banjo. Our tonering (solid brass seated on Honduran rosewood) combined with the 12″ figured rock maple rim, made for a loud banjo with excessive overtones, especially with the goatskin head. Beautiful rosewood binding really complemented the warm tone on the stained maple. The inlay is one of our most popular patterns, the Day to Night (with a small Saturn at the 12th fret).
09213 – 12″ Black walnut with iridescent nickel hardware and crow-themed inlay
The customer wanted a crow-themed banjo that reflected the dark nature of his favorite corvids. So to do this, we stained black walnut (something we haven’t done before), and specialty aged all the hardware after we’d had it nickel-plated. We used one of our blackening methods, a particular technique, that gives a multi-colored iridescence similar to a crow’s feathers. The peghead inlay was a dancing crow of black Tahitian mother-of-pearl, with crow footprints in the scoop (also black mother-of-pearl). Our tonering over black walnut with a fyberskin head combined for a very loud banjo with a really strong mid-range I attribute mostly to the walnut rim and the fyberskin head. The overtones were nice and mild.
Hi folks – here’s the last post while building banjo 200…. In this one we’ll show putting the rim together, the skin head on, and the final assembled banjo. Thank you so much to all of you who have been enjoying the posts. We’ll try to do more things like this in the future….
The new owner in Virginia has already received banjo 200 and is a happy customer…
The photos above and below show carefully putting on all the rim fasteners (lightly aged brass/bronze hardware).
The rim with all the rim fasteners on.
Aged hardware and ebony tuners buttons on blackened nickel tuners in the foreground…. in the background Jason is just putting the flesh hoop over the stained and soaked goatskin head.
Once the flesh hoop is on about 3/16″ below the top of the tonering, the skin is carefully pulled up through the tension hoop.
Setting the tension hoop on evenly and pulling any creases or slack in the goatskin off of the flesh hoop.
Putting all the hooks and nuts on. Jason generally likes to put the front two and back two hooks on first, making sure the tension hoop is aligned properly over the rim fasteners, and then going on to the other hooks. The newly installed skin will then dry for two days in our dry room. Once dry, we’ll bring it in and out of the dry room to acclimate it to different moisture levels as we’re tightening it. This hopefully helps to stabilize the skin for a variety of climates.
An almost completely assembled banjo. The skin head has been trimmed and tightened. The neck and coordinator rod are assembled (sorry we don’t have any pictures of the actual assembly – we forgot to take them!).
The finished banjo! For more pictures and sound clips go to our website at www.romerobanjos.com/09200/09200.html
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