So firstly the banjo turned up on a day when I couldn’t easily get it home, so it sat all lonely in my cupboard at work (after I’d stuck the bridge on it and had a little twang of course) until this evening. On the way home I stopped off to get a cheap bag for it so that I wouldn’t have to carry the rather awkward postage box around on the tube, only to discover that I have an overly long banjo due to a sillily long headstock – it now has a 2/3rds size acoustic guitar bag instead…it rattles around a bit but seems okay. I also picked up some metal finger picks (now that I know which way round they go).
So, I got it home and had a go with the picks. And then put them down for later – the thumb pick feels too long and the two finger picks keep getting in the way of each other…more practise needed.
I then discovered that the 7th fret on the 3rd string is dead – a dull buzzy noise comes out when I finger it. So I got out my Leatherman and the tools that came with the banjo, and fired up google to find a “how to set up your banjo” page. I found this – http://www.banjowizard.com/setup.htm. I noticed that some of the brackets were a bit loose at the tail end of the pot, so took off the resonator (and had a bit of play with my now backless banjo – the first one I tried was resonator-less and was rather lovely…mine is not as lovely, but was about a quarter of the price) and tightened them up a bit. I tried to “tune the pot” but gave up and just made sure that all the brackets weren’t moving around.
So resonator refitted, I had a go at repositioning the bridge to get the tuning right as well as the intonation (so as to stop the annoying buzz). However, the tightening of the skin seemed to have shifted around the shape of everything a bit and the buzz was pretty much gone.
Bridge in place I had a bit of a jangle on my one thing I can play – the simple riff from Duelling Banjos. After 10 minutes of that I reckoned my neighbours were about to come through the ceiling with shotguns, so fired up the Costello family frailing lessons. I had a play with a frailing strum and after a while got the hang of it (although very slowly) and then skipped the rest of lesson one, which mainly is about being able to do a simple strum and to which I have now listened several times without a banjo between my legs. Lesson 2 is a bit more packed and even though the fretting of chords comes easy due to my guitar background, keeping rhythm and playing the inside strings with the back of my nail is not as easy as I hoped. More practise needed, but not for tonight…I hear the loading of shotguns.
