my zyther ' revival

[marc dalmasso]

I buyed this zyther banjo on e_bay 8 years ago ; beautiful but unfortunatly the seller was a liar and the banjo was totally unplayable because of an up_bow ; i think the mahogany neck was not well seasoned and was strong

on the bad way , not inwards as one would expect .

I asked éric ‘ s but it was a big work to do a fine job and i hanged the zyther on the wall ; you can see it on some of my vidéos . It is original because the reso is a lonely ( ! ) piece of walnut reading " june 1905 "

Recently i had the idea to fix it myself ; it was simple to do without de_gluing anything but it ‘s not an usual thing ; so be discret and don ‘t tell it to any body .. i have see the neck was curved in just one point and straight_correct between the nut and fret 11 ; and so from fret 11 to the up_neck ; I just inlayed a lil ‘ piece of mahogany wood . The pictures speaks themselves . I have just to do a few French varnish on the back of the neck and i am gonna start to play it ; Thanks to Rob and his zyther videos back to the zyther Bj

[Carl Anderton]

Don't make us wait for those videos!

[marc dalmasso]

THks guys , the zyther plays perfectly fine , i 'll be back soon with a vidéo . Jeremy , i use regular mix of steel & nylon string ; C & G are nylon ; B _ D & lil ' G are steel strings 009 & 011 . The sound is very good and i am surprised ' cause there isn' t a big difference between the strings ' tone . Some books and tuned in A ? may be it was a very slight neck ' curve or a strange neck ' wood ; gentle heat and clamps doesn 't work at all or may be work for a very slight 'neck curve and for 15 days then the neck will be back to the initial position . These necks are long time curved because the wood wasn 't dry enough when the maker made the banjo . The only official way is to make a new neck and it is even worse on the regular banjo because of the 5th string peg ' hole . See on the picture , there is a 5 millimeter difference ... it is much
Believe it exactly like you don't go ino the moon with a bicycle , you cannot re-straight a neck with gentle heat and clamps

[marc dalmasso]

Yes , Mike , you are right ; it ' s exactly i am doing these times on another banjo with the same problem . I have tried this way on the zyther for 2 reasons : 1 / the banjo was perfectly straight between nut & fret 11 and so on between 11 & up of the neck ; 2 / the neck is glued to the one piece ' reso and de_ glue it to touch the neck would be a big work ( inlays etc ) ; So i tried this simple solution and it works fine ; last point i didn 't used mahoganny piece of wood ( not hard enough ) but a wood we call " satiné " in French ; i guess it is a variety of rosewood @+marc

[Jody Stecher]

Why would one go to the trouble of restoring a zb and then string it to sound like a different sort of banjo?
ZB has 3 voices when strung as intended. No steel = no shimmer. Why deliberately lose that characteristic sound?

[Jody Stecher]

When a zither-banjo shows up (set up and "restored") for sale in the USA it is usually strung with steel and it always sounds godawful and is inevitably rejected by banjoists as unmusical. the rejectors don't suspect the sonic treasure (and pleasure) that the correct stringing and setup can unlock.