Babbling Brooks

Brooks Banjos R&D

Well, I’ve spent six years working in my basement pretty much alone, so this past summer was all about bringing more people into the shop. It was also a really big push into making my own rims again. Bringing people into the shop was much easier than making rims, but I’m not giving up. My machinist is working with me on making a rim bending table that will hopefully make the job much easier.

  I mentioned before that I have brought an awesome musician/friend Chris Miller into the world of banjo making and he has been a huge breath of fresh air. Plus he is a very talented woodworker who has the passion it takes to make banjos. He shows up, works hard, has a great attitude and is really fun to be around. I couldn’t ask for a better person.

The other person I have brought in is Curt Alsobrook. Curt is one of, if not the best banjo player I know and he spent years working at Pioneer Music here in Portland. So he and I are taking each banjo we make in the shop and are playing the heck out of them, looking for ways to improve them. We have so far boiled it down to a few adjustment in set up and realizing that out of all the wood I make my bridges with, the walnut I use for my necks also sound the best as a bridge. Now we are playing around with Dobson tone rings, figuring out if having a brass ring under them sounds best, or if having just the Dobson tone ring mounted on the top of the rim sounds best. So far hard to tell, so next week I have a silverspun that I’m making and we are starting out with the brass ring/Dobson tone ring set up.

This video is of a banjo made with the first walnut rim I have made in 10 years. It is a 12” Spartan rim with just the Dobson tone ring, no brass ring under it. Enjoy and check out my youtube channel with all of the new videos with Curt playing Brooks Banjos. -Brooks

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yiilHPhB6k

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  Looky Looky

  http://brokensoundschematic.com/

The password is brooks if you need it. Please do check out the difference between OT & BG. Good stuff.

Brooks Banjos shop tour

  Here is a pretty detailed spur of the moment shop tour with my new video camera. Sunny day and half a beer, you never know what you will do.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pcPTgjxDaA

New ways of comparing banjo models

  I went out and bought a camcorder last week, it sits on a stand and records videos. The sound quality is pretty good also, a win win situation.

  The most frequently asked questions I get are the ones asking the difference in the sounds of my different banjo models. How does a 12” 20L silverspun sound compared to a 12” 20L that isn’t silverspun? Or, what’s the sound difference between a 30L and a Spartan? The best way to tell these differences is to sit and play them, because they all do sound different and unique. That’s a bit of a trek for most, so here is the camcorder hard at work bringing my shop to you. I’ve cleaned out my sons drum set and hung some old banjos up. New banjos on the floor stands and old banjos hanging from the rafters. Also with the new format I’m cutting out the chatter and just playing the tune. Chatter videos will go up separate, those videos I will hold up the banjo in front of class and tell all about it. Lighting is still a bit tricky, but I’m figuring it out. It’s hard to bring out clear colors in video, even in HD.

Here is a 20L 12” silverspun;

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coYjDb_usao

Here is a 20L 12” not silverspun;

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbK10gM1-mc

And now a 20L 12” cherry rim with a 1/4” bead turned onto the rim, making it a wood tone ring;

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXBsa3hlpdE

An 11” Spartan with a Bacon tone ring;

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd9LLv-UVEM

An 11” 30L with a Bacon tone ring;

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTDbelasJTk

Chatter box;

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tbRAb3-tsU

  Have a Great Weekend!!

Spring

  It’s a Thursday morning and the sun is shining in this rain soaked land. Actually we have been blessed with a little streak of sunny days, which means that the grass in my backyard is 2 feet high and rising and that I have a bench set out in the driveway so I can get some too.

  This post is a heads up. I have been working diligently on my usual spring batch of banjos. I will keep most of it under my hat for now, but I have a few things coming up that I haven’t done before.

  One is a blondie, my first non-dyed maple banjo. Inspired by drooling over Greg Galbreaths banjos and the banjos Jason Burns has been turning out. I made my maple banjo with a highly figured birdseye maple neck and a curly maple rim. Complete with an ebony rim cap and a Dobson tone ring. I have the Dobson tine ring buzz finally, after making a neck for an old 1880 Dobson rim. That banjo blew me out of the water and I have ordered a bunch of tone rings from Bill Rickard.

  The other thing I have done this spring, is to dig into my stash of old silverspun rims I have from various builders from the 1880’s. I pulled the finger board off of an old Diesel slothead banjo and I’m installing a truss rod, then stringing it back up with an 24.65” scale length fingerboard, instead of it original 27” scale. All of the original inlays came out intact, so it will look original. But it won’t be, it will be it’s new humdinger self.

  I took apart a 12” 40 hook silverspun from 1880 and noticed that it used a steel ring on the top. This banjo rim had such a loud and booming tap tone, that I made up my own 12” silverspun with a steel ring, to see how much of a difference steel sounds from brass.

  The other bit of news is that I have a new helper in the shop who is the best shop hand yet. His name is Chris Miller, he is a great musician and a pretty talented at being a very quick learner. He loves banjos, woodworking and metalworking. He puts his tools back where they go when done. He has for sight and can critique his own work well. Even shows up on time!! Bonus Bonus. The need for help became apparent when I went digging through old emails. I did the math, on average I make 30 banjos a year and 60 people contact me looking for a banjo each year. Brooks Banjos is now concentrating on the here and now, trying to have banjos ready and available for the folks who don’t really want to wait 6 months. This is the new goal and I really think Chris can help.

  My camera isn’t working until next week, so for now here is a video link of Flat Rock Stringband. We played a fund raiser for the NW Trail Builders Association, lots of water bottles and hiking boots were to be found. Bananas, apples and chocolate chip cookies were also abundant. We snuck in some liquor, no worries there.

  http://www.flatrockstringband.com/look—listen.html

  Bye for now and stay posted as there will be a little stream of banjos coming out of the banjo still starting next week.

Flat Rock Happenings

Hello, I have been out of the Babbling Brooks sphere for way too long. I’ve been working on a ton of stuff in the shop and have a bunch of updating to do on this website. But for now, here is what Flat Rock Stringband is up to. Thanks to Eric Bagdonas, our guitar player, we now have a website in the making;

  http://www.flatrockstringband.com/

The next event we are excited about happens in Astoria, out at the Oregon Coast!

More on the shop happenings later, I hear a banjo that is ready to ship calling me.

Have a great weekend!

cabin banjo for sale

  I was surprised to see this banjo for sale on ebay today. It is from my second year making banjos back before I stamped numbers on them. This banjo is #12 looking through my ships log and my third silverspun rim. The rim is most likely a very figured piece of maple burl one Dulcimer Dan Arterburn gave me, that I milled and steamed myself. The neck is mahogany I had sent to me from Portland, because even then my wood guy was a Portlander. The finish is French Polish.

  A music store in Kansas originally bought this banjo from me over the phone, site unseen. Learning instrument making from Stephen Owsley Smith made that possible for me at the time. Phone calls would come out of the blue asking me if I had any banjos, I hadn’t even taken a picture of one yet. Steve would tell folks about me and they would call. I pieced this whole journey together through those calls. Thanks Steve! Thanks John Meade! Thanks Jim Curley! Thanks Stephanie Wilds! Yall kept us eating in the cabin and put shoes on my boys feet.

 
    http://cgi.ebay.com/Brooks-Masten-Hand-Made-Open-Back-Fretless-Banjo-/110639213366?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19c29c6b36

POTMG

  The Portland Old Time Music Festival rolled through town once again and I think I like it better and better every year. I think that’s due to living in Portland now for 5 1/2 years and getting to know folks better each year. That’s what festivals are all about right? Enough said. I’m a bit wiped out, so I won’t go into to much detail. If you search http://www.bubbaguitar.com that will give you a pretty accurate idea about the whole thing.

  My favorite thing about the festival is that Jason Romero and Colin Vance come each year and we all get to hang out. It’s a banjo maker pow wow. Doc shows up too and Nate Calkins, sometimes Vern Marr. I’ve gone down to Arcata to stay with Jason in the past and for a few years Jason and Colin would stay at my house during the gathering. My living room was all banjo cases and twang. This year I didn’t get to see Colin as much as I would have wanted, but he did manage to catch me totally ignoring a jam I was in to count the 46 brackets on an old banjo somebody laid by me. Laughing so hard you cry is what gatherings are about right?

  Today was more than wonderful because I got to hang out with Jason and Pharis Romero all afternoon and shop for wood. We made an agreement over the phone we wouldn’t fight over pieces of wood and since he has a 12 hour drive to get here it was really his day to stock up… Did he ever…I walked away with three beautiful necks worth and I’m happy. We actually go for slightly different grain types, so I didn’t get too bad of pangs watching them cut it up for him. Jason does 3 or more piece necks and I mostly make one piece necks, so grain choice is a bit different between us. He also has rims made for him out of the really figured claro walnut, so he needs longer lengths than me. I get very tempted to do the same and make highly figured walnut rims, but there is pretty much only one rim maker nowadays who will do that and that would be stepping on Jason’s toes, because it is his original idea. So I stick with the maple and cherry rims that I love and have the sound I’m looking for. If I ever do make figured claro walnut rims, I will bend them myself. I have the tools in my shop to make rims, I still have my steamer from New Mexico. But it takes a lot of time and the wood is EXPENSIVE, I would have to charge $500 a rim just for the rim.

  Here are a few pictures of the day and Gathering. Doc, sold a banjo, he always does!  Nobody else, it’s not a big banjo selling event. More a meet and greet. Sorry the Gathering pictures are a bit blurry, it was the end of the day and I think I was drinking on the job.

Flat Rock Stringband

  It’s Monday morning and my German neighbor poured way too much hard cider he made down my throat last night as we played cards. So, instead of hitting the power tools this morning, I will babble and let the cat out of the bag;

  It’s official, Brooks is in a new stringband! We call ourselves the Flat Rock Stringband. We are; Linnea Spitzer on fiddle, her husband Eric Bagdonas (twin brother of Brian Bagdonas, bass player from Foghorn and co-owner of Stumptown Printers here in Portland) on guitar, Robin Wilcox on bass and I play my banjos. We have been offered a slot playing one of the square dances at the Olympia Old-Time Music Gathering, so yesterday I pulled out the H2 and recorded us playing a few tunes. We are new and a little rough around the edges, but that’s OK. I think on one of the tunes you will hear my two tiny dogs wrestling and one of them yelps, comic relief! The frogs are my phone ringing, if you hear the frogs. I play banjo 184P on these, the fretless/fretted combo with a Bacon tone ring.

  Flat_Rock_Sally_was_a_poor_girl.mp3

  Flat_Rock_Greasy_String.mp3

  My Brooks Banjo T-shirts are almost complete also, here is a picture of the transfer from paper image to fabric. The original print is a watercolor, so transferring to fabric was a challenge for my printer friends. We had to make these shirts 5 colors with a base bleach since they are dark color shirts. The shirt in the photo is a test shirt, the real shirts will be army color and done on Tuesday, just in time for the Portland Old-Time Music Gathering this week! It should be a very fun week!!

A Bacon Day

Well the post the other day was meant to be saved and re written not posted, but it posted. I wasn’t exactly filled with joy when I realized today that it posted and has been up for a few days. Ouch… Outspoken, unedited and unfinished. Forgive me, I’m not 100% blog software compatible. Live and learn.

To keep it short tonight, here are links to recordings of the 5 banjos I assembled this week with Bacon tone rings. These tone rings are my personal favorites, they are the right tool for me. Have a great weekend!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAYaLaFfh48

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUxAlNYULk4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD8Zb3-2wD8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Byo_Trcy4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1nVyJ9wfgc