Also very, very stoned, as I somewhat hazily recall. And we huffed poppers. Oh god we were young. '98 was even muddier, which I would have said was impossible unless I'd experienced it first-hand. We saw Blur and Pulp. And the fucking Prodigy again.

Banjo's what?

Tempy wrote:

Banjo's what?

Kazooie.

How does one play a mandolin with a violin bow? The mandolin has a flat bridge doesn't it, which makes it tricky to impossible to play on individual strings?

You can play any string instrument with a bow probably.

Its a pretty nice sound if used sparingly.

Or small ones in the case of a mandolin.

You seen that bloke who designed the Moog guitar has got something in the works for acoustics? Looks pretty good. I'll try to dig out a vid.

i think i've seen something about that. It's a kickstarter project no?

Jacuzzi_Jackson wrote:

i think i've seen something about that. It's a kickstarter project no?

It is indeed. Here's a vid:



The Moog guitar looked interesting, but apparently didn't sound that great as a guitar. This looks very interesting indeed.

That's very nice BTW.

It's not a whole guitar, just a device you can attach to any acoustic.

I'll get them uploaded, although I didn't get on with 'You Dare Fight Me' last time I listened to it.

Yossarian wrote:

I didn't get on with 'You Dare Fight Me' last time I listened to it.

Not stood the test of time? Shame. I never could recreate the guitar part as recorded, as it was a loop of a mistake. Very frustrating.

EDIT: That ebow thing - I was wondering how old it is and I just worked out that I recorded it fifteen years ago! I found it a while ago when getting rid of all my old minidiscs - I used to mix down from the four track to a minidisc walkman, so I had a listen through the discs to see if there was any recordings I'd made that would be worth keeping. The glitches on the track are actually due to the fact that the mindisc casing had a chuck broken off so that the disc itself was exposed and damaged. What a weird journey that piece of music has had.

EDIT 2: This thread didn't turn out to be such a ghost town as it could have been - although that's mainly because it's turned into a general musician's discussion thread, which just reinforces Yossarian's point that I should really have just posted in the thread that already exists on that - I'll be more careful about making new threads in the future.

But anyway thanks for all your replies guys. I'm glad to have found such a friendly community at what is not a great time in my life. You guys make me laugh a lot, and god knows I need that right now.

nick_md wrote:

Shit I was looking into picking (heh) up a banjo just last week, need to save a little though. Been playing guitar for around 10yrs on and off and always liked bluegrass stuff, stumbled on Scruggs a while back and though, "aye, I want some of that". Current aim is to get one around the end of the year, but also need to get a new acoustic guitar so need to weigh up which to get first.

I meant to reply to this earlier but forgot. There's two valid schools of thought on how to get your first banjo. You could plump for a nice, high-end beginner or even intermediate instrument at first, but you may not take to it as an instrument and you could be wasting lots of money on something you won't play. Or (and this is what I did) buy a really cheap five-string - they start at around £130 - and see if you have fun and end up putting time and effort into learning and then upgrade in due course. You won't sound good anyway at first, so sounding bad on a cheap banjo is pretty much the same as sounding bad on a nicer one.

BUT!

If you do go for a cheap starter instrument make sure it gets a good setup - banjo setups are more involved than guitar because there's the tension of the head to be considered, the correct placement of the floating bridge ect. My cheap little Ozark served me pretty well to take my first steps on, but I was later told by an expert that it was in a very bad way having never been set up in the first place. The guys in the guitar shop I got it from couldn't be fucked really - they knew I knew nothing about banjos so they just saw it as a quick sale with no work on their part. As I said, I did learn to play on it, but it was a nightmare to tune and sounded even worse than it could have done for a such a cheap instrument. So if you do get yourself a cheap Ozark or Pilgrim without a tone ring, a good, professional set-up will help you get the best out of it. And when you do upgrade you've got a decent back-up banjo that you can take to the park or on holiday and which you can bash about a bit without worrying too much, as your main instrument is safe in its case at home.

Check out Andy Perkins - I actually took the train from London to his workshop to try out a few instruments in my price range before deciding on my lovely Goldtone for £355 (still not a professional-level instrument, but neither are any of my guitars and, hey, I'm not a professional!) But even if you order from him online - and even if you buy one of the super-cheap ones that he carries - you can be sure of a peerless setup from him and his team. If you call the number on the website it's easy enough to get through to the man himself - he only does banjos, he lives and breathes them so it's really worth talking to him about how to start out in terms of buying one. It was great to go down there, but the confidence he inspired in me in my dealings with him means that I'd be happy to mail order an instrument on his recommendation when it's time to upgrade again - which will be a long time because the Goldtone he sold me will do me for years to come.

So yeah, if you've actually got a banjo specialist shop or workshop near you then go for it. But better to get one online from a dedicated banjo works than in-store from a guitar shop, where it's more than likely the staff won't know or care much about the banjos they sell, and either haven't got the expertise or can't be bothered to set it up right - which makes an enormous difference to both the sound and playability of even the cheapest instrument.

EDIT: Just realised you'll probably be wanting a banjo with a resonator rather than an open-back, as it's bluegrass/Scruggs style you want to learn - those are bit more expensive - Andy's start from £245 so obviously quite a lot more than the £130 I paid for my first open-back. Although you could start out on an open-back, no reason you can't play bluegrass on one of those, or frail a resonator banjo for that matter.