Building a Soapbox Banjo, Part III

(If you haven't read Parts I and II of this series yet, check 'em out here and here)

The soapbox banjo is done - it's sitting on my living room table, waiting for me to find it a permanent home. In this installment I'll describe the finishing touches it needed to get there.

As I said in Part II, the last significant bit of woodworking I did was cut a moon and star motif into the soundboard. Unsatisfied with its elegance and simplicity, I elicited a number of ideas from my family on how I might make the soundboard busy and overwrought. In hindsight, at least, that's what I was doing - at the time, I was only dreaming of ways to make the banjo visually striking, and to prolong a process I'd enjoyed.

Aborted decoupage fish-man

One of the techniques my mom suggested was decoupage, which she assured me was a time-honoured tradition dating back to the eighteenth century. My dad rushed to the bookshelf and brought back his copy of Curious and Fantastic Creatures, which he had been saving for just such an occasion. The book compiles a number of drawings based on the work of François Rabelais, sixteen century master of filthy comedy. Every page of the book was filled with the kind of grotesque, deviant imagery that turns my crank. The book fell open to page eleven, showing a fish-man with a long mustache holding a dirk. In my eagerness to free associate with my great-grandfather's shipping adventures, I immediately took this as a sign that the decoration should have a nautical theme. I borrowed the book and brought it home to start decoupaging.

I photocopied my fish-man, painstakingly cut him out and lovingly painted him. The end result was a garish mess. Time-honoured techniques or not, the bright colours looked too modern and worse yet, the fine lines would resolve into one blotch when seen from across the room. I realized it would be all too easy to spoil the mysterious power of a handmade instrument with an obvious admission of dorkiness.

Aborted cornball iconography

I relegated the fish-man to the garbage and struck out anew. I decided instead I would hand paint some symbols, and made a handful of stencils. I decided I could put a small symbol in each corner, connected by vines across two sides of the box. Wary about committing to an idea after seeing how the fish-man might've turned out, I decided to practice on the underside of the board until I was sure I liked what I saw. I spent a very pleasant afternoon painting and listening to records, but the final product turned out corny again. I had chosen a leaf, a crow, and an anchor as my motifs, and although I painted them reasonably well, I felt I would ultimately regret the hodgepodge of imagery like a teenage tattoo.

I flipped the soundboard over to its blank side and stained it, and found that the grain of the wood spoke for itself. I gave it two or three coats of shellac, and finally I was satisfied. I sealed my artistic missteps facedown into the box with wood glue, and attached the neck to the dowel with glue and screws. I clamped it all together as evenly as I could with a half a dozen clamps and left it overnight to dry. With all that gear attached my contraption looked like a monstrous mechanical spider.

Clamped overnight

In the morning I pulled it delicately apart and the glue held. The banjo was ready to be strung and played. Unfortunately, the special strings I had ordered must've been held up at the border, because they hadn't arrived yet. Most players these days use metal strings for their volume and tone, but my soapbox banjo demanded nylgut, a synthetic alternative to catgut, not just for historical authenticity but because it could not support the added tension of metal strings. Impatient, I decided to see if a light gauge of metal string would hold. The main issue was getting the tension pegs to stay in one place. Unlike geared tuners, tension pegs rely on their own friction to keep them in tune, and they wouldn't stay fast. At least this gave me a practical lesson in some things I had only understood academically. "Minstrel C" tuning was standard in the early days of the banjo, although open G is now much more popular. My guess is that banjo players developed minstrel C because it allows them to keep the fourth string, which is the fattest and therefore the hardest to keep in tune, at a slightly lower tension. I have also heard that some players would slack their strings before putting their banjo away, and it's easier to see why after wrestling a bit with my own fickle instrument.

I played a few sludgy, slack-tuned numbers with the metal strings, until the leather thong I had used to secure the tailpiece snapped with a horrible noise that sent the bridge sailing across the room. Luckily the bridge survived unharmed, but when the nylgut strings arrived I replaced it anyway with a lower one. When I had taken my regular banjo to Luke Mercier (a real luthier - read about him here), he suggested that it would prefer a taller bridge, especially if I intended to play clawhammer style. I had a few on hand, so at first I had installed the second tallest on my soapbox banjo, mainly because a taller bridge is supposed to make a banjo louder. Unfortunately, my creation already had wickedly high action (the space between the strings and the neck), so I downgraded it to my stumpiest bridge. I reattached the tailpiece with an old guitar string, which I padded a little so it wouldn't gnaw through the soundboard over time.

Finished product

Profile

Hanging out with Stamping Stick

The most important question is "How does it play?" and the most accurate answer is, "It plays." With the action so high it will never be the silkiest of instruments. I'd need to play a fretless banjo made by a pro to gauge whether the tuning is idiosyncratic or whether I'm just unused to the style. But it has enough volume to be called a real instrument, it's holding its tuning, and simple tunes are easy to knock out. Most importantly, it looks like a million bucks, or maybe I should say priceless. I'm surprised how well it matches with what I had imagined, especially since I resisted the urge to overdo the decoration. In that respect I'd say it earns perfect marks. I'm guessing that I'll play one or two tunes on it in live shows as a novelty, or use it to get interesting colours on a recording. It might also find use as a rhythm instrument, strumming it slightly muted. In any event, I thoroughly enjoyed making it. In my self-conception I'm not particularly handy, but I survived with all my fingers intact and came out with a functioning, handsome banjo. I also think it gave me a direct understand of some banjo lore I've only read about.

Mysterious package

Speaking of banjo lore. A day or two before I completed the banjo, a mysterious package arrived in the mail. It was long and narrow; had my invitation to a samurai sleeper cell finally arrived? But it was even better - my friend Tey in Pennsylvania had come into a Back Porch Pick n' Grin One-String Cigar Box Guitar, and knew that I would appreciate it. Although I don't have the maker's name, all credit to him for his tasteful, minimal decoration. And for the quality of the instrument. The one string makes it easy to play fast and rhythmic, and the pick produces a clicking sound on the edge of the soundhole that is surprisingly catchy. The coincidence that this should arrive just as I am building my own banjo is too much - I'm convinced I am meant to care for strange and orphaned instruments. In fact, in one of the photos I've attached you can see an earlier homemade instrument attempt of mine, a morbidly heavy stamping stick.

Amazing gift

And while I'm being superstitious, there is one thing I'm missing before I can truly say my banjo is complete. There is a legend in old-time banjo and fiddle circles that sticking a rattlesnake rattle inside your instrument will enhance its tone in some dark, mystical way. I would never doubt it, even while I admit I've never heard the rattlesnake difference - or if I have I haven't known it consciously. If you're looking for independent proof, try Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark, or Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. But as Frazier writes, "The musical improvement he was seeking would come as likely from the mystic discipline of getting the rattles as from their actual function within the fiddle." That means I can't in good conscience order a rattlesnake rattle off of eBay and expect an exponential improvement in tone and playing ability. All the same, I must have that rattle. I'd consider the discipline mystic enough if I had to drive to somebody's house to get it, so by all means if you've been sitting on a rattlesnake rattle you no longer have a use for, call me anytime day or night.

And so a soapbox banjo is born, may it survive many years of hard use. It would be rude to make you read all this without giving you a chance to hear it, so here are a couple of early samples I recorded. "Rocky Island" has vocals, "Pigtown Fling" is a straight-up fiddle tune. The tuning gets a little sour in places, but I hope you can hear the sweetness of the soapbox shining through. Thanks for reading; now have a listen:


Rocky Island


Pigtown Fling

Building a Soapbox Banjo, Part II

(If you haven't read Part I of this series yet, check it out here first)

Last week I waxed eloquent about history, that of the banjo and of my great-grandfather both. Spurred on by these anecdotes, I finally got down to building the soapbox banjo I had dreamed about so long.

As I mentioned, I worked from a kit, and when I first took the neck out of the box I was disappointed. It was pencil-marked and slightly splintery, not the kind of thing you could easily picture jutting proudly from a full-fledged instrument. As it turned out, I only lacked vision and faith in the power of sandpaper. The rough cut was just the thing to keep me occupied and flatter my sense of industry.

Sanding away

I threw on some mood music from the Smithsonian, so the banjo would know what it was being born into. As per the instructions from Bell & Son, I sanded the edges down with 100, 120, and 250 grit sandpaper. Sanding brought out the qualities of the wood and the neck began to look downright handsome - the scrolling on the peghead particularly benefited. The neck was squarish, so I tried to round it out at the back where my fretting hand would be, at least up to the fifth string peg. I had read that because of the difficulty of keeping the banjo in tune, traditional fretless players seldom played beyond fifth position anyway. Also, although the action eventually proved so high it was unnecessary, I dug out a scoop where the neck would meet the body. Another trick traditional players use is to play with their right hand at this spot, which lends a sweet, mellow tone. This spot is also where "the cluck" lives, the chicken-y, surprisingly musical byproduct of a well-placed stroke. Because the best tool I had was a hunting knife I bought on a street corner in Mexico, I decided the scoop would only be under the fifth string, what I have heard called a Nechville Scoop. I whittled out a span about two inches long and sanded it to my satisfaction.

Ready for staining

With both neck and dowel stick (a piece that runs through the body and connects to the neck for stability) sanded, I was ready to get staining. I am partial to dark colours, but Bell & Son's instructions advised that a lighter wood like maple would not take to a serious contrast, so I chose a tone in between called Puritan Pine. Funnily enough, my mother later told me that was the stain on the floors in the house where I grew up. The neck had come wrapped in a copy of the Tuscola County Advertiser, which I read with interest before laying it down as drop paper. I applied three successive coats of Puritan Pine and the neck and dowel took on a lovely golden colour.

Finished pieces

I applied a couple coats of shellac, sanding in between, and then a third when I couldn't seem to get it even. At least when I turned it in the light, the shellac seemed to prefer some areas to others. I finally got it right by sanding with an impossibly delicate grit of sandpaper, and the neck was ready to be fitted to the body.

Or almost ready. My great-grandfather's soapbox lacked a lid and the bottom was very thick, so I needed a thin piece of wood to glue over top and act as a soundboard. I went to the big hardware stores around town, but it seemed I would either have to buy an 8' x 8' sheet of quality wood or a very poor piece of pressboard. That, and the fact that shopping at a box store did not seem to suit the mojo of the box itself, started me dreaming ways to find a soundboard with mojo to match. I didn't and don't understand the acoustic properties of different types of wood, but I knew that spruce was the most common material for guitars, you can build a cajon drum out of white birch, and the non-musical, accidental proportions of the soapbox itself would be the limiting factor anyway. I looked at cannibalizing a cheap guitar, but found that expensive and a waste. I went around to thrift stores looking for a smaller object to cannibalize, and thought I found an old jewelry box about the right size made of handsome thin wood. But when I turned it over I realized some tween of the nineties had pasted it over with New Kids on the Block stickers.

There was one more place I knew to look. My girlfriend Rebecca and I were planning a trip to visit our friends in Montreal over New Year's, and once I had bought her a birthday present at curio shop that was floor to ceiling mojo. I used to walk past it on my way home from work every day, and the display of Javanese puppets in the window intrigued me every time. Eventually I decided Rebecca had to have one, and I went in.

It was dark inside; I remember it with birdcages hanging overhead, but there probably weren't. "I want to buy a puppet," I said.

"Ah-ha," said the proprietor, before I could point it out. "For one man, there is one puppet. You will go outside, and I will divine which one speaks to you."

I stood out on the sidewalk while he climbed into the window and hovered over the display. He paused with a serene look on his face, and his hand drifted over the row of puppet heads. Slowly his lowered his palm onto the head of a pointy-nosed lady in a yellow dress. I shook my head.

Calmly the man nodded and withdrew his hand, touched his nose, and indicated the puppet three rows down. "No," I said. He raised his eyebrows and stroked his chin. Intrigued by my sideways spirit that was so much harder to read than most, he closed his eyes and the lids fluttered. A moment later he put his hand decisively on the last puppet of the row.

I pointed out the right one to him and came back in. "I knew it," he said. He lifted it carefully off the wine bottle that supported it and took it to the counter. He laid it there and looked at me seriously.

Happy Birthday Rebecca

"Now he is  yours, you must never pack him away," he said. "The people who owned him last, it was gypsies. They kept him packed up in a chest - it's very bad luck."

"I think we'll keep it on the dresser," I said.

"Also they would smoke," he said. "Smoking near the puppets, you never smoke around them. Look, his dress, you can see it is dirty." He lifted the hem of the puppet's faded skirts with dismay.

"That's terrible."

"Yes, on the dresser. Always you keep his eyes pointing to the door. When you go away, maybe you have a problem, and when you come back, maybe he help you." He smiled mysteriously.

I paid the forty dollars and left. His last words as I have written them are a direct quote - we have always followed the advice religiously and it has never steered us wrong. All of which is completely beside the point when it comes to building a banjo, but the story was inside me and dying to get out.

There was a different man behind the counter when I went in this December, and he very reasonably pointed me to the selection of cigar boxes and supplied me with a tape measure. I thought I might be able to remove the lid for use with my soapbox, and I found one whose dimensions were within a third on an inch and bought it.

Nostalgia had apparently gotten the better of me, because a third of an inch is a lot when you're looking for an exact fit. Also, every surface of the cigar box was branded, and since the soapbox already read "Dominion Crystal White Starch" I didn't want to go into brand overload. The cigar box is in my studio waiting until the next time I'm feeling handy.

Removing the vestigial lid

So long asides aside, for the next phase of the soapbox banjo project I drove down to visit my parents, to make use of my dad's tools and gung ho attitude. He had a slab of white birch lying around leftover from one of his own inventions, and he donated it to the banjo. We cut it out to the 7" x 11" dimensions of the box, and I finally had soundboard. Next I had to make some slight modifications to the box itself so the board would lie flush - the box at one time had probably had a lid, and there was a little lip that raised one side higher than the other. I sawed it off carefully and managed to preserve all the text on either side of the box.

Making holes for the dowel s

The next and probably most crucial step was to make holes on either side so the dowel stick could run the length of the box. Starting with a drill and graduating to a jigsaw, I made a square hole 3/4" down from edge of the box where the neck would meet. As per the instructions we raised the exit hole on the other side by an 1/8", which would make for better action and string tension. When both holes were made I gently filed them both to make a snug fit for the dowel stick, and then I tapped the stick into place with a rubber mallet.

With this done we were entering the home stretch, but there was still some finicky work to be done with the smaller components. The kit came with triangular wedge of wood to make a tailpiece, and I drilled five holes along the top for the strings, two along the bottom to tie it in place, and several in the middle for decoration. I sanded it smooth and was quite pleased with the appearance.

Don't make this mistake

Then I made an idiot mistake which you must never make if you build your own banjo. Hypnotized by the tailpiece, I reasoned that if there were five holes at the one end, the nut (a strip which holds the strings in place at the opposite end) would need five notches as well. One of the strings on a five-string banjo, of course, is the drone string, which being shorter and higher ends closer to the body than the rest. I filed and sanded the nut carefully, with the grooves angling back towards the peghead, but I soon realized that the useless extra notch would make the spacing for my fretting hand quite cramped.

Thankfully, the nut is hardly bigger than a matchstick, and I'll be able to make another from a scrap of hardwood without too much trouble. The last element was the pegs, which needed holes drilled in them for the strings to pass through. Bell & Son suggested this be done with the peg lying in a groove, rather than rolling against a flat surface, so we filed a notch in a board and clamped the pegs to it. With this technique it was easy to drill all five pegs without cracking them.

The final bit of woodworking for the day was to make a sound hole, which at least according to my lazy understanding of physics, could be just about anywhere and any shape. After some discussion of what was desirable and what was possible, we agreed that a simple moon and star motif was evocative without being hackneyed. I traced out the pattern and jigsawed it out, but the saw went a little hard on the thin wood and I was forced to file out my celestial shapes by hand until the chipping wasn't visible anymore. I discovered it is nigh impossible to get a five-pointed star to look even, but I worked until I felt the design looked artfully handmade rather than sloppy.

With that done, we retired for the day. With all the major cuts made, the rest I would be able to assemble at home. Assemble it I did, but I think I'll save a bit of suspense for the next installment of this series. Depending on whether my faux-catgut strings arrive in time from Alaska or wherever they're coming from, I may even be able to post a recording by next week. Stay tuned for more soapbox banjo...

Building a Soapbox Banjo, Part I

When I first laid eyes upon this box, I knew that one day I would turn it into a banjo. Maybe only dimly, because I have had it since it was a teenager, but over years the conviction has only grown stronger so that this month I was forced to act. The process has brought me great pride and pleasure and I will describe it to you in minute detail.

Kit from Bell & Son

My grand ambition at first was to chop down a tree and hew the parts from it where it fell, but to expedite matters I used a kit. My girlfriend Rebecca bought it for me for Christmas from Bell & Son Minstrel Banjos out of Caro, Michigan. Michigan must be a banjo mecca of sorts, because my "real" banjo was made by Bart Reiter out of East Lansing. In any case, Bell & Son claim all pegs and parts are made by hand, preserving the handmade mojo of the soapbox and probably saving me cutting off a few of my fingers in the bargain.

Out of curiosity and to differentiate it from my other banjo, I had decided I wanted to make my soapbox banjo fretless. The earliest banjos did not have frets, which apparently can make for dodgy tuning further up the neck but compensates with a loose, supple sound. As I have heard it, the contemporary banjo is evolved from a West African instrument called the akonting, with three strings and a gourd-and-hide body. West African slaves in the United States built akontings from scratch, where they met European immigrants playing the fiddle. Apparently, space was at a premium on most ships sailing out from Europe and the tuba couldn't make it on the voyage, making the fiddle the most practical and popular instrument. These two historical currents combined to produce what we now think of as traditional American fiddle music.

An akonting

The word "banjo" tends to get left out of the equation, but its rhythmic accompaniment is an essential ingredient to old-time music. Until the early twentieth century, in its various forms and incarnations the banjo was probably as ubiquitous in American music as the guitar is today. Although your straight-up five-string bluegrass or openback banjo is now the standard, the cigar box banjo lives on. Instructions on how to build an "Uncle Enos Banjo" were first published in the 1870's and are still available today, along with plans for cigar box fiddles and cigar box ukeleles. These tend to be technically less advanced but their romantic appeal is unmatched.

Your average cigar box is only a couple inches deep while my soapbox was a whooping five and half, even deeper than a guitar. I wanted a playable instrument, so I hoped this wouldn't make for an unnatural angle when it came time to strum it. Still, as I have said, the thing fairly radiates mojo, more than enough to override all technical concerns. The box was handed down from my grandfather, and it never occurred to me to ask what he was doing with six pounds of crystal white starch until I started this project. My dad said it more likely came from my great-grandfather, which meant the box could be over one hundred years old. My great-granddad worked in shipping, traveling from St. Andrews, New Brunswick to Boston, and from there down to the Bahamas or thereabouts. Sometime after 1910 he bought his own ship, followed by another larger one. The starch box was part of his booty. This info was plenty enough to impress me, but my dad went above and beyond the call of duty and turned up this anecdote: 

[St. Andrews] Beacon, Oct 10/1907

Young Lady in Peril

It was a rather a remarkable coincidence that upon the same day on which Miss Andrews, of Minister’s Island, had such a narrow escape from drowning, Miss Van Horne, daughter of Sir William Van Horne, the only other land owner on the island should also have had [a] somewhat alarming experience, in the water. With some friends she was returning from a short cruise in her yacht Covenhoven, and was about to be rowed ashore from [t]he yachts mooring off the island when her foot slipped and she fell overboard. A Scotch lad who was employed on the yacht was carried over at the same time. To make matter worse the dingy was half filled with water by the two people tipping it up. The youth succeeded in getting into the boat, but with the burden of water in it it was deemed unsafe for you young lady to attempt to get in. Though the situation [was] alarming she bore it good humouredly and assured her friends that there was no cause for anxiety. With one of the yacht’s crew, Herbert Snell, supporting her, and another one rowing he boat, she succeeded in getting shore.  The young lady suffered no ill effects from her dunking.

Herbert Snell, of course, is my great-grandfather, and I was chuffed to learn he was not only a captain in his later days but a dashing hero of the high seas in his youth. What's more, Sir William Van Horne was president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and oversaw the construction of the first Canadian transcontinental railway. When I found this out the soapbox practically began to glow in the dark.

I'm no great shakes as a carpenter, so this series will be more discursive than instructive. However, I've had myself a time sawing, sanding, and tinkering, so I'd like to share some of the details. The soapbox banjo is not yet finished, but it is coming along splendidly and I hope you'll enjoy watching it take shape. Did I sand the sharp angles off the nut? What kind of varnish did I use? Will it sound like anything when it's done? Find out in the next exciting installment!

American Civil War-era Cigar Box Fiddler