The banjo pot is walnut with a rosewood tone ring.

Several years ago, Amber heard John Hartford playing a banjo that sounded as incredible as his playing. It was mellow without being tubby, and had tons of tone. She did some research and found that the banjo was a modern instrument that featured a wooden tone ring. (The tone ring on a banjo is the part the head rests upon; usually it’s made of metal, and can be very simple, like a rolled brass hoop, or quite an intricate profile, like the famous Whyte Ladie)

The idea of a wood tone ring intrigued both of us.

I added maple dividing strips to highlight the wedge construction of the partial resonator.

Fast forward a few years, and I’ve been asked several times if I would build new, 5-string necks for vintage tenor banjo pots. I’ve never said yes, because I wasn’t set up to do it (and because it hurts me to de-tenorize nice old tenor banjos).

After listening to a bevy of banjos (and her critiques on each) while Amber was shopping for a new one, I reconsidered.  After all, I am almost set up to make banjo necks. To practice, I thought I’d build a banjo from scratch and see how the wooden tone ring sounds.  I discovered a banjo builder and pot turner who is interested in wooden tone rings: Mark Hickler. I ordered a walnut rim with an internal resonator and an East Indian rosewood tone ring.

I’ve dressed up the pot a little and rough-carved the walnut neck. So what’s left to do is shape the headstock and add a bunch of inlay.

Then add a little more inlay.

(This is a banjo, after all.)

Orchestra guitar no 14 adds a soundport in the side to give the player a rich, direct sound.

I put the finishing touches on two orchestra model guitars around the holidays, and they sounded great right away.

I tweaked a few details from the earlier versions, including making some minor changes to the bracing. About two years ago, I was talking to local violin maker Tom Verdot, who asked about trying some hybridization between the way classical guitar soundboards and steel string soundboards are braced. I’ve been sketching out ideas ever since and paying attention to how my completed guitars settle in under the tension of the strings. With this pair, I’ve braced the lower belly in a slightly different way that pushes the total weight of the soundboard down while adding longitudinal stiffness to my lightly built tops.

The other unusual feature of this pair of guitars is the addition of sound ports. The sound port changes everything from a player’s perspective. Instead of getting whatever sound filters through the guitar’s back and sides or whatever is bouncing around the room you’re playing in, you get a direct shot of what your guitar is doing. It’s not just an increase in volume, the player suddenly hears an incredible amount of detail, like the color of the tone and the shape of the attack. It’s been entertaining to watch the looks of surprise dawn on players as they first sit down with these guitars. I’ve played a few sound-ported guitars over the years that left me with mixed impressions, but playing these two new guitars in a noisy room has made a believer out of me.

Coming soon: Classicals

A rosette in a new Engelmann spruce top

I’m looking forward to taking a classical guitar soundboard class in early March with master builder Robbie O’Brien. I’ve always loved the way classical guitars look and sound and have been meaning to try my hand at building one for some time. However, steel string soundboards are most often braced with an X-brace support system, whereas classical guitars are most often built with a Torres-inspired fan brace scheme. It seems like a small thing, but the two types of soundboards work decidedly differently. When I found out that Robbie was planning to offer a short workshop focused solely on the classical soundboard, I jumped at the chance to learn more about a different way of doing things.

I’m really looking forward to completing the prototype classical I’ve been building bit by bit over the last month or so, and hope that I can sneak it across the finish line by mid-April or so. My biggest complaint with my factory-built classical is that the mid-range is muddy and the upper trebles are weak, so I’m  using a spruce top and red maple sides and back in an effort to really pull the trebles out on this prototype. I’m hoping to build a couple classicals over the early summer and begin offering it as a new model for sale this fall.

I’ve also added sound ports to these guitars (the first time I’ve used a sound port). Most guitars sound very different to the player and a listener standing in front of the player (it depends a lot on the wood used for the back and sides of the guitar—some are more “transparent” sounding, like mahogany, others change the sound quite a bit, like maple). The sound port is the oval cutout on the upper bout that pipes a little bit of the “out front” sound of the guitar up to the player.

The tops are Adirondack spruce, of course, and the maple body is accented with hormigo while the palo escrito body is bound with palo escrito. The string spacing is my slightly wider 1-3/4″ nut with 2-1/4″ string spacing at the bridge. The fretboard is Honduran rosewood with a 16″ radius. The bridges will be black walnut.

One particular tape was a favorite. It was an eclectic playlist, including the Andrews sisters and Tim O’Brien, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Bob Carlin, and Cryin’ Sam Hutchinson (C-H-I-C-K-E-N!). But our favorite number was called Freight Train Boogie, by the Delmore Brothers. Game changer, even for a ten year old. We wore that tape out.

This Delmore Brothers tune, “I’ve Got the Big River Blues,” is a great example of how Alton & Rabon used the tenor guitar together with the 6-string guitar.

Flash forward 15 years or so, and I rediscovered the Delmore Brothers, appropriately enough, through another radio station, the fabulous WDVX, while living in Knoxville, TN. They spun the Louvin Brothers’ Tribute to the Delmore Brothers version of the Freight Train Boogie, which added a last verse along these lines:

The Delmore Brothers was a mighty team
They could play guitar and sing like a dream.
They rocked this nation with a brand new beat
When the freight train boogie got ’em on their feet

We dug up some Delmore Brothers without delay, and it was love at first listen, again. The sweet sound of Alton’s tenor was a big part of that. I decided, even if my own brother had inconveniently turned into a true bass (ruining any hope for family close-harmony), I needed to hunt down a tenor guitar.

Despite having an embarrassment of tenor banjos (it’s sort of like a flock of geese), David and I had never even seen a four-string guitar live and in person. We started asking around amongst musician friends—nobody had one, other than one or two archtops chewed up (literally) and spit out by the Texas fiddle contest scene.

One spring we were at fiddler and accordion player Dwight Lamb’s house for a session and a visit, and he said, “Lloyd Snow might have a tenor guitar for you.” We were delighted and Lloyd came to visit the next day.

We’d met him once before; he had salt-n-pepper hair and a big, friendly smile, and a big presence in a room. His hands said he’d been a farmer much of his life; they were thick and strong and cracked, and narrowed at the tips to nearly a point with the nail. He had sat in Dwight’s “music parlor” and sung for us in a rich, clear baritone, accompanying himself on a vintage Martin dreadnought. He had a prodigious memory for lyrics and could really sell a song, even in a sunny living room, with the washer running in the background.

Lloyd and Wilbur Snow had played in a band with Dwight years earlier called Red Lamb and the Snow Brothers; Wilbur played harmonica, while Dwight fiddled and Lloyd played guitar and sang. We learned one of Wilbur’s two steps, which we now call Wilbur Snow’s Tune.

When Lloyd came in the parlor this particular day, he carried two cases, one large, and one a small cardboard case.

He told us the story: he’d been trading his Gibson for what he considered a serious upgrade, the Martin dreadnought. The trade took sort of a bizarre turn when the gent agreed to sell him the Martin, but with one condition: Lloyd had to take the tenor as well. Lloyd wanted that Martin pretty bad, so he went ahead and took the tenor, but he didn’t know what to do with it, exactly. He had slid it under the bed in his spare room sometime before 1980, and when we opened that cardboard case in 2004 or so, there it was, nestled in a chocolate brown shag toilet-seat cover like the pearl in an oyster.

We bought it on the spot.

Even after so many years, it sang out with a clear, bright voice, which only got better with new strings. It was like waking Sleeping Beauty to find she’s every bit as charming as you’d imagined.

Lloyd showed us the Martin he’d gotten along with it, and we had to agree it suited him, with a smoky sound and a nice dark finish that looked right with his overalls. He demonstrated by singing us “The Little Black Bronc,” a ’40s ballad of the trials of a cowboy breaking a new horse (not to spoil the ending, but the horse got the best of him).

Here’s “The Little Black Bronc” as played by Al Clauser and His Oklahoma Outlaws.  (Listen close for a hot tenor banjo in this band!)

Lloyd passed away not long after, but we consider ourselves lucky to have met him, and hope to take good care of his tenor.

After handling quite a bit of brace wood, I began to question that last assumption.

While cutting braces for the pair of orchestra model guitars I’m currently building, I squared up some leftover pieces to test whether grain direction affects stiffness. I was sort of scientific-ish about it; I didn’t run 300 test pieces to make it a proper study or anything, but I did have fun.

The squared stock needed to be accurately thicknessed in both dimensions and well quartered. I cut two pieces 16″ long and supported the ends, leaving a free span of 14″. I used the widely accepted standard weight, a one rubber mallet unit, tied to a piece of string looped over the center of the free span. Then I set up a dial gauge to measure the deflection from at-rest to under-mallet-stress and came up with the figures in the chart below.

Huh. It doesn’t seem that the quarter-sawn direction resisted deflection better than the flat-sawn direction.

Does this mean I’m going to stop carefully quartering my brace stock? Probably not. There could be other reasons that quarter-sawn braces prove better in the long haul. Maybe they resist splitting better, don’t deform over time, or resist becoming more or less convex as the humidity changes.

I’m also curious how runout and grain count affect stiffness, so look for tests of those characteristics in the future.

Update, August 26: I’ve added a listing for this guitar.

A grand concert twin to this guitar is coming in a few days!

Update, August 26: I’ve added a listing for this guitar.

These sets show incredible figure now and will be eye-popping under shellac. I’m setting this tenor up to be tuned slightly lower, like an octave mandolin (G-D-A-E), rather than the more common C-G-D-A tenor tuning. Its big sister will be a grand concert size six-string, and this batch of sugar maple so far sounds like the best cherry, with a nice pinging tap tone.

Sugar maple tenor and grand concert set

Sugar maple tenor and grand concert set

She made them by cutting lines into the plastic knobs with a sharp pen knife and forming dots with a pin held in a pin vise, then adding ink to the burrs. For the printmaking types out there, the line quality is like a drypoint intaglio.

They look totally unique, and really dress up the tenor prototype!

The neck is attached to the guitar using four bolts and no glue, so it's easy to take off for future repairs.

This style of neck joint adds support for the fingerboard along its entire length.

The orchestra prototype is fitted with a roughed-in neck.
I can begin finishing the body while I carve the neck.