Originally published at: How to make a good guitar sound like a bad banjo | Boing Boing
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If the point is to get more direct string sound and less resonance from the body, I wonder if you couldn’t get the same or better effect by taping a piece of cardboard over the hole.
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“bad banjo”. . . now there’s a redundancy.
(full disclosure: banjo was my first love as a child.)
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I don’t need a balloon to make my guitar sound like a bad banjo.
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Perhaps you’re mistaken. That there is a bad-ass banjo.
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Steve Martin’s skills on the banjo are really amazing.
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“Put a balloon in the hole and blow it up a bit.”
This one weird trick will blow your hole up a bit.
I think part of the effect is that the balloon mimics the banjo head (and the strings likely hit it a bit for that percussive sound). I’ve got a classical guitar with cardboard over the sound hole (to try to lessen feedback while electrifying it which is a whole other “trick”) and it just dampens the sound.
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The strings don’t hit the banjo head (at least they don’t on mind). I think that percussive sound comes from a mix of the material of the head, which looks and feels like the same stuff on a snare drum and the resonating chamber (some banjos have piece mounted on the back that help give it an extra bit of volume).
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Oh yeah, for sure. I was just hypothesizing that in the balloon-in-guitar-hole scenario that the guitar strings might hit the balloon a bit since it’s presumably sticking up out of the hole a bit.
Ah ha! I mis-read what you were saying.
When I first checked out the post I had hoped it would have been about banjo rolls on the guitar or something along those lines. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around that all year.
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