Lots of things have been written about setting up a bluegrass banjo. Some people think there is a specific RIGHT WAY to do this, implying that everything else is a WRONG WAY. I've tried just about everything over the last 40 years and have learned some basic concepts that always seem to apply. Here are my thoughts on the subject. I hope they will be help you get the most out of whatever type of banjo you have.

The first thing to understand is how a bluegrass banjo actually works as a musical instrument. All sound is made by something creating vibrations in the air that hit our eardrums and are relayed to our brain. Beating two sticks together gets the job done or a tree falling in the woods. In the case of the banjo we pluck a string causing it to vibrate. This vibration is conducted through the bridge to the banjo's head. Vibrations in the head cause the air inside the banjo to vibrate. These sounds/vibrations are bounced off the inside of the resonator and projected out the holes in the flange straight at anyone listening.

This process should be pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it. However, this doesn't explain how the unique sound of a specific banjo is created since all banjos do not sound the same (if they did we wouldn't need to bother learning how to set them up).

The word used to describe all of the unique qualities of individual sounds is timbre . Think of the open 3 rd string of a banjo and the open 3 rd string of a guitar. They are tuned to the same note, but obviously sound different. The same thing is true of this note played on a homemade banjo made with a possum hide for the head and a 1937 original flathead Gibson Granada. Same instrument but very different quality of sound.