I know plenty of people have used monofilament fishing line as banjo strings with success. Anybody ever tried using braided line? Just curious.
I don’t know why someone would even think that would be a good idea, there aren’t diameter differences to fit the range of an instrument and don’t they have any acoustic properties at all
Tried it in the past. It just goes *ThuD*. Stretches an awful lot also. Definitely a no go.
Back when, before you could get proper gut/nylon strings for a banjo, I would use various gauge fishing line on strings 1,2,3 &5 and use a classical guitar D string, silver wound for the 4th. Worked very well.
I've got a very dim old memory of seeing braided mono being used by a W. African musician, I think it was on a ngoni, and him talking about learning how to make that braided string. Anybody else heard of that?
I also recall some time later trying to make a braided nylon banjo string, which as you might expect was tedious work with similarly unsatisfactory sonic results to those which Alvin describes.
I have strings on my open back that are braided steel wrapped in nylon and the sound great! They are about the same tension as nylon, but the sound is in-between nylon and steel.
They are Thomastik Infeld strings called Classic S. I bought a treble set and added single strings to get the right gauges for banjo.
Only thing is, they’re a little too short, so I had to make a jury rig to put them on, but they sound great.
Sadly, my efforts to get Thomastik Infeld to make a banjo set have fallen flat.
Braids should be confined to hair.
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