Bishline Clermont Banjo Review











This is the first professional banjo I've ever owned! It's also one of the very few instruments that did not require any adjustments depsite my rather picky tastes. The nut height is perfect, no filing needed. The frets are all level and seems to be as perfect as an instrument that has been passed through a PLEK machine. No buzzes or rattles on any of the strings. It came with ghs PF150 light strings gauged 10-12-14-22-10 and I had 5th string spikes installed at frets 7, 9 and 10. There's a lot of pictures, a few sound samples and some comments below. It came well packed, surrounded with lots of wrappings! I subsequently purchased another fine banjo, a Gold Tone OB-3 Twanger and its review can be found here:

  • Gold Tone Twanger Review

      1. Banjo weighs 11.3 pounds
      2. Banjo case weighs 9.8 pounds
      3. Price paid $3,895
      4. Tiger maple with traditional white binding and a cremona finish
      5. 3-pound bell-bronze tone ring, 20-hole Flathead
      6. Ebony fingerboard with original MOP inlay
      7. Rim is 3 ply maple
      8. Two way truss rod
      9. Nickel plated hardware
      10. Scale length 26 3/8"
      11. Nut width 1 5/16"

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    Sound Samples


    There's a picture of my recording setup below. I just purchased a Shure SM81 mic, EQ set to flat, fed to a Studio Projects preamp. Tracks recorded onto a Zoom R24 then ported to Reaper and rendered as 320 bps mp3 files. I did move the mic position around a bit to experiment with different sounds so not all the sound samples will sound the same. Although I like the JD Crowe thumbpick a lot for it's powerful attack I did struggle a bit with it thumping the banjo head during recording.

    Sound sample 1
    Sound sample 2
    Sound sample 3
    Sound sample 4
    Sound sample 5



    A Few Comments

    No regrets with this purchase. It was expensive and worth every penny to get an instrument that I'll never have to upgrade or spend hours re-working it to make it playable. Any banjo at any price point will not be enjoyable to play without a good setup and this one is spot on right out of the box. I purchased this directly from Rob at Bishline and followed his recommendations for a banjo stand and capo. The very low cost banjo stand works well with the banjo's low center of gravity and although it looks precarious it's extremely stable. I also own a Gold Tone Twanger which has the same exact string set. The Gold Tone has a sharper tone whereas the Bishline is more mellow and still very clear. Both have excellent volume and either one is a totally professional instrument although the Gold Tone did require a bit of setup work by me to level the 2nd fret and adjust the intonation. I was able to procure a set of Keith D tuners which will go on the Bishline and a set of Schaller D tuners which will go on the Gold Tone. My recordings above represent my progress after 6 weeks with the Earl Scruggs 5 string banjo course purchased from Amazon.com. I have a lot of experience with pedal steel guitars so using the finger picks and learning a different picking patterns was not too hard. I can't recommend the Earl Scruggs course too highly as it includes tabs and sound files for the tabs all on one place if you use it on an iPad or iPhone. I've been using the blue Herco plastic thumb pick and old style heavy National metal fingerpicks which can attack the strings real hard when desired. At times it seems like I might want more attack from the thumb pick so I've ordered a BlueChip J D Crowe medium thumb pick, a Fred Kelly medium and one Zookie large and one Zookie medium thumb pick to try out. In addition to the Earl Scruggs course I am learning a lot of chromatic riffs off of YouTube and a really nice version of Blackberry Blossum from Ross Nickerson's "Beginning The Five String Banjo" course.




    There are quite a few pictures below. Click on them to see them full size or at least sized to a browser window. Click on the picture again if needed to zoom in even more!







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