Yankee_Picker's myHangout Homepage at the Banjo Hangout

Premier Sponsors

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue, we will assume that you agree to our privacy policy which includes details of cookie usage. Hide this notice

Yankee_Picker

You must sign into your myHangout account in order to contact Yankee_Picker.

BLOG

FRIENDS

REVIEWS

ABOUT

Wow I suck at restringing

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Well after reading the feedback I got about when to restring your banjo, I realized that it was high time to change out my 9 month old strings. So this morning around 9:45 AM, I collected my banjo, some diagonal cutters, a soft pencil, a new set of D'Addario LEO10 strings, and my Banjo for Dummies book...aka the Bible for Newbie Banjo Enthusiasts.

About 2 hours (yes, TWO HOURS) later, I finally had a tuned banjo with new strings.

The most problems I noticed having were keeping the loop ends around the tailpiece when drawing initial tension. I finally solved this by wedging in the tip of a mechanical pencil. But I'm not sure I wound the excess string around the peghead in the correct direction or not, so I tried it both ways. So when I started pulling tension, the loops around the peghead started unwinding and/or sliding off the top of the peghead, or I would get up to tension and find I had loops of slack all around the peghead. So I would unwind it and start over.

And over.

Finally, I think I have a nicely strung 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th string. My 4th looks pretty suspect. I tuned the instrument, played it for a couple minutes, and then re-tuned it. It held that tuning throughout the next hour that I played the instrument, and I think it's still in tune, so it seems as though I was ultimately successful.

Too bad that I can completely string two tennis racquets in the time it took me to string 5 strings on my banjo!

Oh well. Practice makes perfect, right?

3 comments

Playing Since: 2009
Experience Level: Novice

Interests:
[Socializing]

Occupation: Science Teacher / Engineer

Gender: Male
Age: 48

My Instruments:
Banjo (now), piano, bassoon, trumpet, euphonium, tuba

Favorite Bands/Musicians:
Sonny Osborne and Bill Evans

Classified Rating: not rated
Rate this Member

Profile Info:
Visible to: Public
Created 2/8/2010
Last Visit 9/9/2011

I spent so much of my time over the past several years in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, that I listened to a lot of local radio. So one day I decided that I wanted to play the banjo. After telling a few people about it, I learned that there were several amateur bluegrass instrumentalists who worked on some of the same jobsites that brought me out in the first place. The hotel clerk's dad was a banjo player, one of the dozer operators was a banjo player, a miner was a fiddle player, and one of the electricians was a guitarist. After hearing them talk about their music and watching a couple video clips, I was convinced that the banjo was the next instrument I had to learn to play. Not that the banjo was ever far away from my instrumental tastes... my first 8 note polyphony Hammond organ (ca. 1980) had a banjo voice on it that I always used to play Stephen Foster music. So I researched banjos from the reviews on this website, and made a deal with my wife that if I went back to teaching and left my job as an engineer that required so much travel, I would be allowed to buy a banjo. Of course, the fact that teaching pays half of engineering meant that my funds were going to be limited. I looked up the affordable brand new instruments and settled on a Mastercraft Deluxe from thebanjohut. For what it cost me, I'm very happy with it. Hell, it cost me even less than a tone ring (which obviously means that it doesn't have one). All things considered, it does what it needs to do, and to the untrained ear (and most banjo non-enthusiasts), it sounds fine. I am teaching myself to play from Bill Evans' Banjo for Dummies and can competently play Cripple Creek in bluegrass style.