Great tips Jack, thank you very much! I went to Amazon and purchased the Snarkman tuner, I have several tuners but it doesn't hurt to have another. Also, the capo I use and like is the Paige banjo capo. It can be left on the banjo, just slip it above the nut, snug it down and put your banjo in its case. Thanks again, take care and God bless!
Yeah playing with others was what finally made me get it done A good guitar luthier shoudl be able to do it pretty cheap if you order the spikes from Deering.
Thank's so much for the email my friend, I love that Snark tuner i have one myself. :>) Now i can't get the hang of usin a capo my fingers finally are getting the memory of where the frets are on the fret baord without me looking at it all the time BUT when i try to use a capo forget it ! my fingers forget where they are.
That's interesting! I try to think of the capo as replacing the nut - so I'm moving the first fret down however many frets in my mind. But I guess the distance frets is a bit different, so maybe that's where you're running into trouble.
Great tips. I bought a used a Pisgah that had the railroad spikes already installed on the 7 & 9 frets, which I was looking for. I find though that it is not tuned to A when I use the 7 one. Kind of defeats the purpose. I don’t know if they were installed at the wrong location possibly?
How far off A are we talking? Unless the string is entirely failing to fret at the 7th It wont be the location of the spike, it's just the nature of them. A lot of banjos have a 5th string nut (or pip) set up in such a way that the string will never intonate properly when fretted and you'll always have to retune anyway.
