When I laid eyes on it I thought a luthier had gotten completely confused about what he was repairing. Surely,I thought,there must be a guitar body out there with a banjo neck for sale somewhere.
I felt as tho I was in the twilight zone. The music store visit started normally enough,with me looking thru music books. Then,I wandered over to the instrument section.
There she was,on a stand. For under $100. As I had never seen one of these in my life.I asked one of the employees about it. It was a banjo-guitar,they told me and they were anxious to sell it. Appears all the teens had been stopping in and picking Metallica and Led Zep tunes on it,and it was driving the staff nuts. They wanted this instrument sold as soon as possible. I had no idea what to do with it....but it called me. They even lowered the price just to get me to take it home. Well,for whatever reason it wound up coming home with me. I took it to a different store to get it set up properly,and after knocking about with it,I really didn't know what to do with it. So the banjitar wound up sitting in it's case for years. It was my pre internet days and there were simply no information on them. No idea of the history of the instrument,what styles were best for it,nothing.
So my crazy years (see mandolin page for details) hit and went. Eventually I got the banjitar out of the storage unit I was using and got it home. I started exploring the banjitar online and wound up contacting a guy by the name of Mickey Cochran who not only played one,but wrote up a marvelous paper on the history of the instrument. (my biggest regret was not printing it as he passed on and all of his work went offline!)He asked me to review a "how to play" DVD he had made on the instrument,which I did. Many good tips were given in the DVD which I use and pass on to this day. We had gotten "out of touch" as life and business were making demands on each of us,sad to say.His passing was most untimely and he died at a relatively young age due to blood clots.
***************************
I have since written a series of banjitar articles for the Banjo Hangout and also have my own banjitar web page "Play Banjitar Now!.
I do teach beginning banjitar online,so drop me an email (as given on the Online Lessons page) with "banjitar lessons" in the subject line. I teach flatpicking,fingerpicking to beginners.All lessons in TAB. Learn when to use a capo and on what fret in addition to capo chords.
No comments:
Post a Comment