NPBD, Plectrum Banjo is a thing!

[stevo58]

What is on the left? It looks like a B&D flange, but the flange metal looks brand new.

That is a custom-built tenor by Karsten Schnoor of Hamburg. It’s a mixture of Style 1 and Style 5. It also has a few “modern” features such as co-rods and a truss rod. It’s about five years old. I had been playing flatheads before that (Prucha, Deering) and they just weren’t cutting through the horns. Karsten was great to work with and the banjo is absolutely perfect in every way. He also builds beautiful archtops (including a gorgeous 16” L5 tribute) but my instrument accumulation is complete.

[Christian Miller]

Actually I took it to band practice after less than two weeks, and now I'm only taking the banjo and not the guitar. I'll gig with it in less than two weeks' time.

Nice!


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[shpalman]

Nice!

Alternatively, it goes to show what level my guitar comping was at, that I can more or less match it on the banjo already .

I think the point is that since the banjo already sounds "right" for this style of music, it's a lot less effort to play compared to guitar. And it's easy to take solos - just play the chords but in a higher voicing and louder.

A side effect of using Musescore to learn banjo, is that I learned Musescore. I decided that our dixieland version of Silent Night (arranged for us by Roberto Beggio) needed a slow intro (in the Salvation Army band style, is what I had in mind) so I decided to write it, and it worked. Mainly I wanted to be get everyone to do that Bb, Bdim, Cm, Am7b5 thing. Then I offered to arrange anything else they wanted, especially as I'm away from home with a laptop but without an instrument (I'm just about the only swing dancer who isn't at Snowball, it seems like).

The clarinet player asked for Sunny Side of the Street based on the Benny Goodman / Peggy Lee version, so I spent a few days doing that. I used the Illinois Jacquet "Alt 1" riff at the end. Since most of them can't really improvise I wrote the solos for trombone and sax too. It's not really in dixieland style but then it's not really a dixieland piece, it's from 1930.

Now I've started transcribing Sam Levine's version of Ja-Da but I have trouble picking out close harmonies.