The oldtime banjo blog from Kiel

... but cooool: The Black Atlantic from Netherlands: Why don´t they have a banjo with ´em?

Ever heard of Steve Baughman? He is a very, very melodic guitar picker. Uses tunings like C-G-D-G-C-D, he calls it "Orkney-Tuning". As I find the "normal" guitar tuning sort of special enough for me and there´s work enough to get to know the fingerboard in normal tuning, I´m not going to risk a nervous breakdown with DADGAD or Orkney-Tuning - although hearing him kind of makes me anxious to play such pieces too... But what made him even more interesting for me was his "clawhammer guitar" style which he often uses with celtic tunes. I stumbled over this while browsing through the latest edition of the German magazine "Akustik Gitarre". They put a video clip with Steve Baughman on their website here . He shows his clawhammer technique from minute 3:38 onwards. As he tells on the clip, his guitar for this is tuned in D-A-D-G-B-D, very banjoesque. And it´s bump ditty! Should give it a try sometime.

Schon in 2003 berichtete Bild der Wissenschaft über eine Untersuchung von Joe Dickey von der John Hopkins Universität in Baltimore im Fachmagazin Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Bd. 114, S. 2958). Zwar ist in der Zusammenfassung von einer "Banjo-Gitarre" die Rede, aber BdW meint anscheinend das good ol´ five string banjer: "Banjo-Spieler werden in der Arbeit allerdings nur von ihnen bereits intuitiv erkannte Tatsachen über ihr Instrument bestätigt finden," nämlich, dass die Klangfarben in großem Maß variiert werden können. Wenn man dann noch die Möglichkeit einbezieht, alle fünf Saiten mal richtig gestimmt zu bekommen, wachsen die Mögichkeiten ja auch ins Überirdische - finde ich.

Joe from Pennsylvania (Hi, Joe, thank you very much!) sent me the following link to a very good guitar player - and his friend who is replacing the banjo. This left me speechless ... Clawhammer is crap! Unfortunatly I´ve got no informations about this guy.