1920s Lyon & Healy American Conservatory Fretless (Modded) Tenor Banjo

I love it when customers allow me to work on weird projects for them. A back-and-forth over email led to this creation -- a lined-fretless tenor banjo tuned DGBE with nylon/Nylgut strings like a minstrel-era banjo minus its drone string. Yes -- weird! It does sound pretty incredible, though -- you can approach it with a pick and it sounds almost shamisen or oud-like or you can fingerpick it to get that minstrel-era vibe.

The banjo itself is a mid-grade, Chicago-made, good-quality Lyon & Healy product with their "advanced amateur" branding -- American Conservatory -- on the dowel. It's maple throughout and has a non-tonering rim -- though it's very well-made and has heavy-duty hardware all over. It's all-original except for the bridge, strings, lack of frets, and a new set of Gotoh 4:1 geared pegs. The serial number correlates probably to 1921, though also might spell-out 1927. Considering the short scale and general style, I think it's probably more like 1921, though.

Specs are: 20 7/8" scale, 1 1/4" nut width, 15/16" string spacing at the nut, 1 1/2" spacing at the bridge, 10 3/4" head, and 2 5/8" rim depth. Action is 1/16" at the 12th "fret" and the neck has a medium C/V rear profile and flat board.

Work included pulling the frets, installing plastic fret marker lines (just binding material), a board plane, new heavier rosewood bridge (to get a mellower/warmer/thicker tone), the tuner install, and a setup with Aquila Nylgut strings. I used the DGBE strings from their Alabastro guitar set as I wanted to have an unwound G. A cool alternate tuning/stringing for something like this project might be tuning it to dGBD in a uke-like fashion to get a drone going for a clawahammer player.

The headstock veneer has a ton of dryness cracks. I had to glue a bunch of it back together and stabilize it.