Will the type of wood used for a banjo neck affect the tone of the instrument or is banjo tone a product of the rim/tone ring only?
Yes
In my experience, the type of wood used for the neck makes a huge difference. Many years ago, I decided to try a Stelling banjo and located a source in the UK that had several in stock (that was amazing then!). I visited the store and tried four Stellings, a Sunflower, a Red Fox, a Swallowtail and a Crusader. They were all brand new, straight from Geoff's workshop, standard setup so as near as possible identical except for type of wood and decoration, same tone-ring, same strings, bridge and head. All the banjos were maple except the Crusader which was mahogany. All the maple banjos sounded very similar, but the Crusader was different. To me it had less 'attack' , a softer, less aggressive tone and more sustain. The choice of wood certainly does make a difference.
Let’s see, the banjo produces sound when the vibrations of the string are transmitted through the bridge to the head.
Vibrations are also transmitted through the nut on the neck. I can feel the neck vibrate on my Sierra.
So I conclude the wood used in the neck indeed makes a difference in the tone.
There must be a reason banjo-makers don’t use pine from the lumber yard!
There are those who say the fretboard wood makes a difference in sound.
EVERYTHING which is solidly affixed to an acoustic instrument will have an effect on its resonant properties.
Some much more than others...
Even the material that tuner buttons are made of, can matter.
See Deering's take on the subject.
There are so many variables other than neck wood to get the sound that your ears like the best. Bridge weight, type of bridge wood, skin or plastic head, head tension, string height, guage of strings, rim construction, tone ring and on and on it goes.. Your best bet is to buy lots of banjos and decide from there :) Of course the person playing it makes the biggest difference
Edited by - Billybilt Banjo on 11/23/2024 11:45:56
quote:
Originally posted by NNYJoeLet’s see, the banjo produces sound when the vibrations of the string are transmitted through the bridge to the head.
Vibrations are also transmitted through the nut on the neck. I can feel the neck vibrate on my Sierra.
So I conclude the wood used in the neck indeed makes a difference in the tone.
There must be a reason banjo-makers don’t use pine from the lumber yard!
People don't use pine for necks because it's not strong and stiff enough to make a stable neck given the dimensions and string tensions of most instruments. Plus it's so soft that it's not durable. It's just a nonstarter in this application. (That said, it would probably work ok for ukuleles, which have short necks and low string tension).
Southern yellow pine might be usable in this application because it has hardwood-like properties.
I was at a three day banjo workshop and was telling a fellow there that my banjo just didn't sound as nice as a lot of the banjos I was hearing in the workshop. He suggested I asked the people who had banjos that I really liked the sound of what wood they were made of. Five of them I liked best were maple, mine was mahogany. It was good advise. I planned on upgrading after the workshop and I think that I would have bought another mahogany one if I hadn't done that. I could most definitely tell the difference and I'm pretty new to banjo.
Edited by - BG Banjo on 11/29/2024 11:07:11
The type of wood in the neck affects the tone due to the stiffness of the wood and the subsequent "restoring force" imparted on the vibrating string.
Maple is a harder and stiffer wood than mahogany and thus will "resist" the force of the vibrating string more. This results in a brighter sound, as well as longer sustain because the neck doesn't absorb as much of the energy of the string.
To my ears mahogany (relative to maple) has a slightly delayed response from the pick, a darker and sweeter sound, short sustain, and a "dry" sound with fewer overtones.
Maple is the opposite of this with (imo) an edge to the tone and a growl to the 4th string.
Walnut is somewhere in between due to the hardness being somewhere in between.
I like them both!
There are so many factors that affect the tone of a banjo (tailpiece type and placement, Tone ring, bridge etc), that I think it would be folly to think the wood of the neck is going to make any discernible difference. You could "tell the difference" because they were different instruments.
In my opinion, if you were to list all the factors affecting banjo tone in order of importance, neck wood would be close to the bottom. There are so many other variables that supersede it , among the most significant are head tension and bridge thickness. With just those two elements, you can make a flathead sound like an arch top, a mahogany necked banjo sound immediate and bright and a maple necked banjo sound dark. Using Scruggs as an example, can you tell the difference in tone between Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Pike County Breakdown, (The former being maple and the latter mahogany) that is attributable to the difference in neck wood? Both are pretty bright sounding and, to my ears, Pike County is the brighter of the two. Groundspeed is another example. If it was recorded with the RB 4, the head must have been extremely tight for some to believe that it was recorded using an arch top Granada. And this doesn’t take into account other variables such as head thickness, and tailpiece height.
I agree that wood makes a difference. Years ago I obtained a Greg Rich RB 3 and set it up EXACTLY the same as my Granada which was the same year as the RB 3. I listened VERY carefully to both banjos in a long A/B test. As the player, I could DEFINITELY hear a tonal difference. (This test was mahogany vs. maple, both had rosewood fingerboards).
The maple was more "complex" (overtones) with longer sustain. The mahogany gave a "shorter" tone, simpler, with less overtones and natural reverb, if you can call it that.
Now one can PROBABLY achieve this with set up. But I firmly believe the neck wood makes a banjo "lean" in a particular direction. Set up can perhaps amplify it, or neutralize it, for all I know.
Later I got a Scruggs 49 Classic and it sounded pretty much the same as the Granada. Just wanting something a little different, I put a Huber "heavy coating" head on it. That darkened it up a noticeable amount. I have gotten tremendous compliments on that banjo's sound.
I know folks who have, and have made banjos like a Scruggs with a mahogany neck however -- which is an arrangement Earl himself had for a time in the 1960s.
I would suggest if you want a classic Crowe sound from the 1960s to 2000s, get a mahogany neck. Yet that finally recording he made with Rickey Wasson with 9584-1 had a great more complex tone, that I think tickled JD a lot.
quote:
Originally posted by The Old TimerI agree that wood makes a difference. Years ago I obtained a Greg Rich RB 3 and set it up EXACTLY the same as my Granada which was the same year as the RB 3. I listened VERY carefully to both banjos in a long A/B test. As the player, I could DEFINITELY hear a tonal difference. (This test was mahogany vs. maple, both had rosewood fingerboards).
The maple was more "complex" (overtones) with longer sustain. The mahogany gave a "shorter" tone, simpler, with less overtones and natural reverb, if you can call it that.
Now one can PROBABLY achieve this with set up. But I firmly believe the neck wood makes a banjo "lean" in a particular direction. Set up can perhaps amplify it, or neutralize it, for all I know.
Later I got a Scruggs 49 Classic and it sounded pretty much the same as the Granada. Just wanting something a little different, I put a Huber "heavy coating" head on it. That darkened it up a noticeable amount. I have gotten tremendous compliments on that banjo's sound.
I know folks who have, and have made banjos like a Scruggs with a mahogany neck however -- which is an arrangement Earl himself had for a time in the 1960s.
I would suggest if you want a classic Crowe sound from the 1960s to 2000s, get a mahogany neck. Yet that finally recording he made with Rickey Wasson with 9584-1 had a great more complex tone, that I think tickled JD a lot.
That's pretty much the same thing Ned Lubrecki said a couple weeks ago at the banjo workshop I attended. I think you and he probably know what you're talking about, so I'll just take your word for it and let it go at that.
Edited by - BG Banjo on 11/29/2024 21:01:19
If you're a perceptive person/player you would tell the difference for sure. Like others have said, the neck wood will color the tone in a way that persists even with different setups.
I like this video as a bit of a comparison between maple and mahogany banjos.
youtube.com/watch?v=m8tQeetcEt0
There are obviously some other differences in the banjos (20 hole vs no hole ring, brass vs pot metal flange), but it's probably about the same setup and the same player. In particular, you can hear how the low C sustains on the maple banjo.
quote:
Originally posted by LouieCheeThe type of wood in the neck affects the tone due to the stiffness of the wood and the subsequent "restoring force" imparted on the vibrating string.
Maple is a harder and stiffer wood than mahogany and thus will "resist" the force of the vibrating string more. This results in a brighter sound, as well as longer sustain because the neck doesn't absorb as much of the energy of the string.
To my ears mahogany (relative to maple) has a slightly delayed response from the pick, a darker and sweeter sound, short sustain, and a "dry" sound with fewer overtones.
Maple is the opposite of this with (imo) an edge to the tone and a growl to the 4th string.
Walnut is somewhere in between due to the hardness being somewhere in between.
I like them both!
What if you compared a mahogany neck with a slightly fatter cross section to a maple neck with a slightly thinner cross section? What if you then put a beefier truss rod in the thicker mahogany neck?
We could stipulate that all else is equal for comparison sake, but when comparing banjos in the wild they aren't all built exactly the same.
"We could stipulate that all else is equal for comparison sake, but when comparing banjos in the wild they aren't all built exactly the same." -- That's why I put (sequentially) four CNC cut necks, maple, white oak, walnut, and mahogany, with the same hardware on a single pot. I recorded the same tunes played the same as best I could AND single plucks with a technique guaranteed to be much more reproducible than the observed differences between the necks. Even non-banjo players could hear the difference with the played tunes and could match species-labeled recordings with unlabeled ones.
The measured differences agree with the standard lore. However, my take is that the differences are small compared to what you can do with set-up and swappable parts. The link to the sound files and graphs is in the sixth post in this thread (https://www.its.caltech.edu/~politzer/neck-wood/neck-wood.pdf).
